This book came about while sitting with my grandmother and digging through numerous old newspaper articles and inherited paraphernalia. I was fascinated with the conversations that came about around these slowly yellowed pieces of paper and antique objects. I came to realize that I had grown up around so much history and diversity and was completely oblivious to it all. The dinning room table and chairs, the set of dishes with the red painted apples, the old radio and twin beds in the spare room with the crocheted pink and green turkeys on the bedspread, were all something belonging to the past and a distant relative. I realized that someday my mom will inherit these family heirlooms, and I from her, and my kids from me, and shouldn't I know where and who they were from? This passing down of material things from one generation to the next comes with a loss of memory. One of my ancestors cut out a small clipping from a newspaper article and saved it in a box and after their passing was inherited by another and so on and so on until generations later no one knows why they did or what it means. It exists only as a document of time.



These family heirlooms speak of more; the passing of generations, the fading of community and social norms, and the relationships between generations; an inevitable fact that we are related, whether by blood or by memory. More than anything, they exist as artifacts related to people. What do they tell us about culture and time? What will I add to the pile? What will my kids remember me by and in three generations from now, will my great grandchildren cherish the things I have saved just as I have cherished them? What will speak for my generation? I am still unsure of a lot when it comes to understanding these objects but I am making connections.