A long time in the making

When I was 9, dad and I started a stamp collection as a show and tell project for school. So was born a love of history, particularly American history, and stories, and things old and past. His own grandmother, Jenny Garretson, had wakened that same love in him at 12, giving him a book on the U.S. Constitution.

Fast forward 45+ years to downsizing from house to condo and happening upon both that book and what was left of my on-again/off-again stamp collection. A new project was born--a little something to eventually pursue in my retirement years: I would recreate my family history in both words and stamps related to the times, places, stories and events of their lives!

Such great raw material: My mother's Italian parents--essentially an abandoned foreign teen in the US and his mail-order bride; my father's mother’s Swedish immigrant parents. And there was the fact that both those lines will end with my brother and me. Neither of us has children.

What fascinates me is my connections to all that has come before, from the merely old to the absolutely ancient. So, I began to actually track down the facts, fictions and fantasies that make up all those lives. It has, so far, been an extraordinarily rewarding pursuit.