Monday 3 August 2009

Open House

Norma publishes a newsletter called Grandma News, which may well be responsible for her excellent computer skills; it is all typed up and full of pictures. She takes contributions from family members and family friends and posts hard copies to I don't know how many people. I saw the latest edition on her refrigerator and noted that Bill's and my visit had made the front page in an invitation to come meet us on Thursday afternoon and evening. Norma had Art busy re-arranging tables and such while we went on our tour of houses drive.

When we got back it wasn't long before people began to arrive, beginning with two of Norma's sons, John and Jerry.


It's always hard to fit everything in on these occasions: eating, meeting people, taking pictures, eating, talking, looking at pictures,


eating... Truth be known, I only got a glimpse of the character of each of Norma and Art's children, meeting them only briefly other than Spike, in whose company we spent several hours.


However, I have email addresses and I'm hoping to correspond and to know them a bit better in time. We'll just have to see how that goes. I'm definitely going to hang onto Norma and Art as long as possible -- they are absolute treasures.


Another lady who came to the open house was Ruth. I gather Norma only knew her slightly and realised they were somehow related. Ruth brought pictures that Norma and I were really enjoying. Someone asked how we were all related and rather than trying to do the 3rd-cousin-twice-removed (I never will understand that stuff), I just said that our grandparents (Norma:Clara; Ruth:Lizzie; Shelley:Jacob) were all siblings. I thought it was really kind of Ruth to come and to share her lovely pictures and stories. I made sure I got her email address as well.

2 comments:

Rick Stone said...

I finally did the paid part of Ancestry.com. I've been using the free part and had some info on there. A second cousin, once removed, (hehehe) contacted me from the list and got me going. I've now grown my list from around 100 to almost 1000, just in the past three days. I'm now back to the 14th century and have traced Dad's family to England and Mom's to France and Germany.

Shelley said...

It's great to have your family tree go back, but of course if you've not done the research yourself, you can't know if it is right. I have a couple of branches where other people have extended my research, but as I didn't find what they did I'm not sure how much to trust it. My German line has been taken back to the 1500's by people I know to have gone to the records in Germany so I'll take their word for it...for the time being. It's a lot more fun if you've done the research yourself, bit by bit -- they feel more like 'yours' somehow. It's a great hobby to have -- time consuming, mind!