As I write this, our world is in the middle of a global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 Coronavirus. It is a scary time. And weird. New phrases like “self-isolating” and “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” are common in our vocabulary from now until who knows when. My work building is closed for 2…
My grandmother, Jeanette Shrum Willett, left us a wonderful handwritten manuscript of her life which she wrote in the mid 1980’s. She was born August 4, 1897 in Bloomington, Indiana and died March 3, 1988 in Salem, Massachusetts. I have been transcribing her manuscript here. You can start from the beginning with Part 1. We…
My grandmother, Jeanette “Jenny” Shrum Willett, left us a wonderful handwritten manuscript of her life which she wrote in the mid 1980’s. She was born August 4, 1897 in Bloomington, Indiana and died March 3, 1988 in Salem, Massachusetts. I have been transcribing her manuscript here. You can start from the beginning with Part 1….
When my grandmother, Jenny, was in her 80’s, my cousin Leigh encouraged her to write down her personal stories so that the family would always have it. My grandmother wrote one journal for Leigh’s mother, Jean, and one journal for my mother, Lee. Always practical and thrifty, she used two old calendar books. The…
I’ll bet you thought from the title of this that this would be a post full of all the yummy things my Mom created in the kitchen during my childhood. Hardly. My mother wasn’t a very good cook. In her defense, her mother, my grandmother Jenny, wasn’t much better, so she really had no one…
Deciding what to write using Amy Johnson Crow’s prompt, “First” was a challenge. My goal for 2019 is to profile certain ancestors that my girls would not normally know about. This blog has always been for them and for them to meet their ancestors and to see my journey as I discover them. So I…