A Repair Job

This mama kangaroo and her baby were a sewing project for me a long time ago. This week they were again on my to do list. Construction the first time, another mending this time. I spread and laid  out fake fur , layered on patterns, cut and hauled out my Singer to sew, then stuffed.  I embroidered eyes and remember giving a proud sigh of relief that I was able to finish mama and baby before Christmas in 1975, the year Ben was nearing 18 months old. Now, his own children still play with them.  Three year old Oliver brought them to me and told me to "fix it!', pointing to a parted seam or two and spilling stuffing. I told him I would work on it "tomorrow"  and we put Kanga and her Roo in a chair in my room.  But a little while later, I picked them up thinking about all those years ago when my sewing gift made Oliver's Daddy smile. So I  threaded a needle, sat down and repaired broken places.

This stuffed toy is real. Remembering The Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse.


"You did it!" was all the thanks I needed! 

Family Names, Notes, and Dates

My mother's handwriting was beautiful, distinctive.  I always spot it among a stack of  old papers.  As I sorted a file of family records recently, I spotted her writing on 4 pages of yellowed lined tablet paper. They contained names and dates of both hers and Daddy's family. I am sure I found it going through the many boxes of her things, filing it away until I could give it more attention. Each entry could have its own story.

I will make an effort to do just that, but for this post, I want to record the photographs of the pages and make some general observations. While I am recovering from my back injury, I am unable to sit for very long at my laptop.

Today it is important to remember that record keeping was very different in the 2 centuries these dates reference.  Passing information from generation was done by recording births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths in a family Bible, by word of mouth, by writing notes in a tablet much like these. For us now, census and church records and gravestones only supplement online research and helps like Ancestry.com

I see that my mother did her best to record names, date and place of birth, date and place of faith commitments and baptism, sibling names, date of marriages, and date of deaths. Just reading the family names is like poetry to me. I hope I am able to work on developing our family history in a way that will be available to all who wish access. At the least I can make the bits and pieces of information I do have accessible to others.