FAMILY HISTORY...

I have been working on a project for quite a few years, which is to clarify, codify and give homage to many small bits of paper (including photographs and letters) which bear witness to the lives of various members of my family, stretching back in time.

 To start with, I'll illustrate this process with two photos of boxes assembled to do this organizing:

The painting over the plastic boxes in this picture is one I had done years ago in Nantucket. It's fitting that it's there because it represents my other enjoyable preoccupations: drawing in ink, painting with watercolors and chalk, and taking photos. The doing of this blog is very much in accord with these: an attempt to get closer to nature and its mysteries, including those of human nature.

Here is another photo of the boxes, which also include cardboard file boxes...I will add some photos of them too, not as decorative as these plastic boxes with their neat labels, but labeled they are with various couples' names and eras.

Since writing this above, I am very sorry to say that my cousin, Nick Roach, has passed away. It was Nick and another cousin, Jim Keegan, who initiated me into this wonderful process of stepping back, bit by bit, into the past to revisit and connect with each our branches of the family. They had begun the process by both researching things on Ancestry.com and then I was fortunate enough to be included in this backing and forthing of found photos and letters which we each had discovered and then shared...

So more, then, about Nick and Jim in the next post...