52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 19 - Preserve

 This week's prompt for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 is Preserve.  What do I preserve?  I preserve paper.  I am from the 20th Century; I spent the first 53 years of my life in the 20th Century.  I believe in paper.  Paper is solid, paper exists, paper can be preserved with archival materials and methods, which I learned in my scrapbooking hobby.  Paper doesn't get evaporated in a computer crash.  Yes, it can be damaged by fire, or water, or insects.  But properly preserved and protected, it can last for decades.

I do have a lot of my paper documents digitized; I am really quite belt-and-suspenders.  But when someone suggests that I digitize everything and toss the paper away, I cringe, my skin crawls, and I stand up and say, "No!"

My dilemma is that my photos for the past couple decades are digital.  I have, from time to time, sent some of my digital photos to Shutterfly to be printed.  I did that a lot when I was scrapbooking, something I hope someday to get back to.  I want at least to finish the ones I had to box away when other matters had to take precedence.  But paper uber alles!

Some preservation I have done has been in storytelling, especially to our grandson who is now 19 and in college.  He has enjoyed tales my husband and I have told him of our experiences in the Coast Guard.  He has enjoyed stories of ancestors' antics.  I should record some of these stories. 

Right now, I am engaged in digitizing a whale of a lot of photos and other documents from my husband's family, a request made by our nephew Paul, who visited recently.  He lives in Australia, and was returning there with some items he retrieved from storage after he left his last U.S. dwelling.  However, he had second thoughts about shipping the photos to Australia in a box with the other items.  He has left them here for me to scan.  On a future visit, he will claim his paper photos.  But I will have my own copy of this digital trove of my husband's family photos and documents to add to my genealogical information on his family.  And I can send some of my digital copies of these to Shutterfly, too.

Finally, a significant part of my ways of preservation involve photos and paper documents and storytelling.  These all find their way into the scrapbooks I have made and those I am hoping to complete when things settle down for us.  In these scrapbooks, preservation is the chief goal, and paper is king.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 18 - Love Story

 My grandmother Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White must have been lucky at cards, because she was unlucky in love.

November 25, 1913, she married Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, probably in South Bend, where Ruth lived with her mother.  Frank Reed's family lived in Logansport, in Cass County, Indiana.  They had three children: my uncle Donald Reed, my aunt Margaret Reed, and my mother, Martha Reed.  Frank Reed worked for a railroad as a switchman.  He was killed 22 October 1917 when he was hit by a railroad-yard donkey engine.  He was 29 years old.  Frank Reed and Ruth Nave were my grandparents, my mother's parents.

Sometime after 1920, Ruth Nave married William Walter Pennington.  I don't have their marriage record yet, and haven't found it online.  A cousin of mine lives in Logansport, Indiana, where my grandma and William Pennington lived, and has offered to search for that record in local records the next time he goes downtown.  William Pennington died 4 September 1927 in Logansport.  In an awful irony, he, too, was 29 years old when he died.

14 August 1942, Ruth Pennington and Harold Blaine White took out a marriage license.  I have not yet found their marriage documents.  Harold White was an unstable person, as far as I have been able to find.  He cites himself as having several different jobs, from farming to railroad fireman to telephone cable splicer for the Bell System (AT&T).  In census records and on his World War I and II draft registration forms, his employment is spotty and, on the censuses, his income minimal.  Ruth, his wife, made up to three or four times as much as he did, and she had a fairly steady record when she was working.  She was a telephone operator.  His pattern of job-hopping (if he really held such jobs at all), the periods of unemployment reflected in censuses, and the minimal income he reported, may indicate his mental instability.  He died in 1960, in a mental institution.

Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White died in 1951.  The informant on her death certificate was her husband, Harold White.  One thing he did may have indicated some caring for his wife: she is buried next to my grandfather, her first husband, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 17 - War

War!  Huh!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!

Those who were around in the 1960s will recognize that line.

Though rational people would prefer to avoid war, one thing that comes out of it: stories.  At least it is good for stories.  Many of the stories that come out of war are, as one would expect, grim and gruesome.  Some are sad stories, some touching tales of humanity or the lack of it.  And some are just downright funny.

My father, Arden Packard, was in the U.S. Navy in World War II.  He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1934.  Having been fascinated by flight since he was a lad, he applied for flight training, and was so assigned in 1937, at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.  He became a carrier-based naval aviator and his first assignment as a naval aviator was to USS Yorktown.  One story that came out of his days afloat concerned the commanding officer of a destroyer assigned to a carrier group.  One night, after the captain had retired to his cabin for the night, one of the other ships lost control and began to drift into the destroyer's path.  The captain was summoned to the bridge and quickly briefed.  He began to give orders.  "Now, everyone stay calm.  Stay calm, like me," he urged.  Then he barked out this order:  "Two toots on the rudder; right full whistle."  Dad never mentioned whether the ships collided or managed to avoid it.

There were sad stories about friends who never got to see peace restored.  Dad had two best friends at the Academy.  Their names were Edward "Ned" Worthington and James "Jimmy" Newell.  Ned Worthington was killed at Pearl Harbor.  Dad died in April of 1954 of pneumonia.  Jimmy Newell outlived them both, and my mother and I visited him and his wife in Norfolk, Virginia, when I was in high school.  The three Navy buddies had an agreement that they would each be cremated and their ashes scattered from a U.S. Navy aircraft.  Ned Worthington's ashes were scattered off Koko Head in Hawaii.  Dad's were scattered over Glendale, California.  I don't know about Jimmy Newell, who most likely passed on many years ago now.  My father assigned the nickname "Ned" to my brother, in remembrance of his friend.

[This post is a little late.  I'm catching up.]

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2024 - Week 16 - Step

Step lively, there!

Oh, sometimes lively is not what I am feeling, but I do perk right up when I'm working on genealogy.  It might be mine, it might be my husband's, it might be that of our son-in-law, who has added the lively step of Germany and the Netherlands to our genealogical mix, which has been rather boringly British with just a dash of Swiss.

I say, the more the merrier!

One Step I took a few years ago was to sign up with the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, in which they took my DNA back much farther than anyone else has done -- about 700,000 years!  They determined that I am 2.1% Neanderthal and 1.1% Denisovan, the latter being another offshoot strain found in the Denisova Caves in Siberia.  A waggish friend said that this revelation means I am "3.2% extinct."  Sometimes I feel like it.

Genealogy will broaden our perspective, as long as we do it correctly, and don't try to either do it lazy by just collecting names whether they belong to us or not, or by using genealogy to press an agenda.  That's been done in the past, from Spanish subjects in the 1400s to 1600s trying to hide disapproved ethnicities from the authorities and the Inquisition, or by some citizens of St. Augustine, Florida, during the 400th anniversary celebration in 1964 to "clean up" their backgrounds.  Other citizens, marginalized by the first lot, knew what these folks were up to, and knew how bogus these scrubbed genealogies were because they were descended from the same people, and could snicker behind politely-held fans.

I've signed up late, because I just found out that Amy Johnson Crow, originator of this series of blogging prompts, is still at it after, what, 10 years?  Nice!  

So Step into my parlor (said the spider to the fly), and let me see if I can entertain you with posts concerning whoever I can dredge up that I have not already blogged to Infinity and Beyond.