Family Stories Hidden in Boxes

Some large furniture pieces are now out of my house. Feels good and a bit shocking. Need to buy a new bed frame and perhaps a dresser or shelf. We'll see.


Yesterday went through another box of old papers--looks like my grandmother never purged her own parents' box of letters and legal papers, so....I found stuff relating to my great-grandfather's siblings. While it helps me piece together some interesting stories, you wonder how much this procrastinating of dealing with boring paper clutter just literally pushes boxes of papers on to the next generation.


Yes, I found a poll tax from 1915. That sounds cool to some, but I have "it's really old" fatigue. I'm thinking this should have been trashed a few generations back. But, it's not all bad. I learned some stuff, like Great-Grand Aunt Mary* had a cafe or bar called Mary's Tavern. And if the newspaper clipping was saved because he was her husband (as he had her last name), her husband was killed by a bolt of lightening in the street. In the same family, Great-Grand Uncle William had a bride of 16 who died of typhoid fever after a month of marriage. It sounds like a TV mini-series. While I resent people not dealing with a TON of the less interesting papers, it is amazing to see the drama three, four, and more generations back. How much happened that we'll never know because no one actually wrote out a narrative? Or just didn't know it would be of interest later down the line?

*Note: ancestry.com informed me that it's not great-great aunt but great-grand aunt. I'll take their word for it. 



Another person whose paperwork has been left was my great-great grandfather who was a Methodist pastor. Because he qualified as a public figure, little items about him would run in the paper, like how his five children had "sore eyes." (What is that? Pinkeye?) I call those papers the old form of facebook. I also have various legal documents and letters that are so dusty they make my skin itch. I realized that not only was he a Methodist pastor (among other jobs), but his father-in-law was as well. I had known this but not really put it together as two generations of reverends. The funny part is that I was not raised Methodist and had zero experience with Methodism until I was maybe in my 20s. I'm not Methodist today, but it's interesting to see it was a big thread in that side of the family. In contrast, my grandfather's side was raised Church of Christ, which is quite different, I would guess. I wonder how many denominations are part of my entire family tree--I would guess all of them in the end.

It's worth being careful when sorting through things--the stories are good to know. But I hope to lose the stuff that does not need to linger in boxes anymore, e.g. my grandmother's 1928 perfect spelling test.  Or a stack of 1930s real estate documents and land abstracts. It's not interesting, and it's accidentally unkind to never cull that stuff. At least I'm getting a few rewards in learning some details about people I knew little about before.
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Update: Hours after writing this, I found most of Mary's estate documents from the early 1960s...and guess what I found? Keys to the tavern and house. SIGH. Well, I wasn't sighing, but that's the polite version.