We admit it—we loved our March/April cover girl. What we didn’t know was how much everyone else did, too.
“When I saw the cover, I let out a scream because the girl on the cover is an old, old friend …”
“Where did you get the photo?”
“The woman on the cover is my mother.”
Wait a minute—our cover girl has a story?
Once upon a time, just about anything you could dream up could be realized at the drugstore soda fountain.
It was yesterday’s answer to the corner coffee shop—a place where people could meet, talk, and have a tasty treat—but a lot more fun. Back in the day, corner drugstores graced almost every corner.
Old houses are full of fascinating family history. But not everyone is so lucky as to land a house that formerly belonged to their own family. So how do you find out more about the history of the house you live in?
Study the architectural style of your home. Is it from about the same time period as the houses around it?
Finally we can all have a reason to like taxes–we can put them to USE when LOOKING for our family history.
Never has a government said, “Golly, we don’t feel like collecting taxes this year. Let’s just skip it.” You pay taxes. Your children will pay taxes. And your ancestors before you paid taxes.
Forget trees. When it comes to family history, mixed media artist Valerie Atkisson relies on everything from paper clips to tanned goat skin to celebrate her family history.
“I wanted to bring life into the raw, vital information that you get from genealogical research,” says Atkisson.
When Eliza Jones, a former slave living in South Carolina, went to register for a savings account in 1871, she couldn’t sign her name for identification, nor could the bank afford to take a picture of her. But the bank wanted some way to distinguish Eliza from other would-be claimants.
What, you say, that can’t be right. Ancestors’ birthdays don’t just change, do they?
They might, if you’re looking at the wrong calendar.
Most of us are familiar with a single calendar—the Gregorian calendar, the one we use today. But, depending on the country, not all that long ago, your loved ones might have been living with the Julian calendar.
One day, when she was eight years old, my grandmother Louie (Kennedy) Beard and her sisters Meredith, Theone, and Nettie decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Each girl made their own, not sharing with anyone; Meredith was particularly adamant about this. Louie, Theone, and Nettie finished their pancakes easily as they each made small batches. But not Meredith.
Remember the days when snapshots from the dinner party featured a room full of revelers relaxing with a cigarette? When ashtrays adorned office desks? When everyone from Lucy Ricardo to Archie Bunker graced the small screen with a smoke?
Not long ago, nearly everywhere you turned, someone—and at times almost everyone—was smoking.
I was in the midst of a computer science degree in the mid-1990s and eager to create an experiment on what was then the new Internet. Names immediately came to mind. I’d always been interested in given names—there are so many of them, each having a hidden meaning, and most having a history that can go back millennia—I thought at least a few other people would be as well.
