week 25 - "finding my grandmother's scrapbook"



My grandmother Mim's scrapbook



Bernice Mose

         Part of my family research has involved trying to get in touch with my cousins, most of which I have not seen in 50 years.  That, in itself, seems impossible.  I can't be over half a century old, can I?  I hadn't been able to find many pictures of my father.  My mother has some, but they have been divorced for many years.  My father, his parents and both of his siblings are gone; so there isn't anyone to ask about family pictures or family history.  I finally thought of my cousins and began the process of locating them and writing them letters, asking if they had any pictures of my father that I might not have seen. 

     After many weeks, I finally got a letter  in the mail (none of them apparently uses a computer or email).  "They have no pictures and they are sorry to not be of more help".  THEN, I got another letter telling me that I started them thinking and they remembered a box of their mother's that has been in the attic forever.  They went up to find it and discovered a large envelope full of pictures and a scrapbook that my grandmother had kept, passed down to her daughter, and then passed down to one of my cousins.  I was so excited I could hardly wait        to meet with them and see what they found. 

             We met at my cousin Carolyn's house.  I remember her babysitting for me and teaching me how to make chocolate chip cookies.  She still looked basically the same.  I think I would have recognized her on the street.  Anyway, we sat at her kitchen bar and looked through everything.  Lots and lots of pictures of my grandmother as a young woman with three young children, several pictures of my father as a child and one of him in the Navy, even a really nice picture of my grandfather (one of only two in existence I think).  I was so excited.  It was like a trip to the past, seeing homes my father lived in as a child, seeing him as a 4-year-old playing at the park with his mother and brother and sister, hamming for the camera - all these pictures will certainly help with my research on my father's side of the family. 

     I also found out interesting facts about my grandmother that I had not known before.  My grandmother Bernice Mose (Mim) lied about her age when she applied for a marriage licence.  She was

Grandmother Bernice Bryson with her mother

only 14 when she and Fred Alfred Weber got married.  She and my grandfather had three children and then divorced when my father was young.  He and his brother went to live with my grandfather and his new wife and Mim kept her daughter to live with her.  None of this I knew until a few months ago.  Then in 1934, at the age of 30, she married the man I always thought was my grandfather.  In 1938 my real grandfather died (at the age of 41) and my father and his brother went back to live with their mother.  It makes me sad to think of the many years when my father was so young and had to endure his parents' divorce, being separated from his mother, and then his father's death, all before he was 13 years old.  These are events that were never talked about when I was growing up. 

     The scrapbook itself is old and brittle and yellowed with some of the clippings or hand-made cards falling off the pages.  I was able to carefully take the book apart and make copies of each page.  There are lots of birth announcements, wedding announcements and death notices and a wealth of information with dates of all these events.  Bless my grandmother for keeping such a meticulous scrapbook of her life.

One of the pages with my wedding announcement

       One of my favorite finds in the scrapbook

is a hand-made card that my father created for

my grandmother on Mother's Day.  He wrote her a poem telling her how special she was and entitled it, ONLY ONE MOTHER.  This was dated 1936 when he was 10 years old and living with his father and stepmother (who didn't like him very much). All such events go together to form a person's personality and way of looking at life.  I wish my father was here to ask how he feels the events of his early life formed him as a man, a husband and a father.