With my love of family stories, personal history, and personal material culture it is ironic that I see my Family Tree pruning itself into oblivion.
My daughter is the last women of my maternal line. She is so much like me in many ways. I always said until I was in my early 30s that I would never marry and neither would I have children. I did not lie, but situations and feelings change and evolve. My daughter, created and parented by husband and I, is the light of my life. She is 29 years old, married, successful in her career, and quite happy with her life as it is. She and her husband do not want children.
Bittersweet.
What do I do with the photos of my matrilineal ancestors? The passing down of records and even the inheritance of some material possessions comes to an end with me. My daughter is not interested in the collections amassed by the child of Depression-era parents. She laughingly talks of building a tiny house for herself and her husband, and then building one for me and one for my husband. She thinks we will get along better if we each have a tiny house. I laugh and love her comfort level with herself and with us. I have succeeded as a mother. Roots and wings.
So as I entered this year, 2019, with no significant liminal phases – birth, graduation, marriage, or first professional placement – in the works for my daughter’s along her timeline, I have realized that my love of women’s history and personal history will now turn not only to helping others learn how to use social media, write online, and use contemporary tools as they evolve but into helping myself find and place my memories and things into their proper places.
I am documenting the stuff of my life as I dispatch my life’s accumulation of things to their respective fates. Join with me as I travel this path of conscious curation of my life and that of my ancestors as I understand it.
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