Here’s another idea for anyone interested in family history: field trip!
In May, I visited my family in Illinois. My dad showed me some of his keepsakes: the stamp collection he started as a kid, arrowheads collected by his grandpa (who was a farmer and found them as he plowed the field), the watch his parents gave him as a high school graduation present, drawings made by his grandfather (when his grandfather was 10). Then there’s the ring that used to be his uncle’s. My dad doesn’t wear jewelry and rarely dresses up, so it always cracks me up when he models the ring. It’s so out of character.
The town my dad grew up in (that I was also born in) is about a 35-minute drive from where he currently lives. He took my brother and I on a tour of houses he used to live in, places he went to school, parks he played at, where he worked in summers during college, where my grandma worked before she had kids.
If you get a chance to go on- or lead- a guided tour like this, I recommend it. Even though the area looked different than it did when he was a kid, seeing the places my dad inhabited gave me a greater understanding of what life may have been like for his family than I had from just hearing stories about it.
As a kid, one of the places my dad lived was near an A&W restaurant with a gravel parking lot- the kind of restaurant where you park your car and the waitstaff comes to your car to take your order and deliver your food. He used to go there when the restaurant was closed and look for coins on the ground. Then he’d take his findings to a mom-and-pop store a block from there and buy bubblegum.
Sitting in the car outside of one of the houses, my dad described how he kept rabbits in a hutch behind the garage. That’s the first time I remember hearing about him having pet rabbits. These stories seem to have come up only because we drove past the old house and the lot where A&W used to be.
We saw the field of corn where my great-grandma used to gather young ears of field corn [grown to feed livestock] and boil them for her family for dinner. When I first heard the story, I wondered if she had to slink to the field after dark so she wasn’t seen by the farmer or passing cars. After seeing the area, I can tell that wasn’t necessary. Her house was almost the last house on a dead end street, just one lot away from a huge cornfield, no farmhouse in sight.
New versions of old stories play like movies in my head, apparitions at dusk replaced by brazen sunlight.