Collections

  1)    Most of us collect dead ancestors and relatives now - what did you collect when you were a child or teenager, or adult?
 

I’m a little behind with last Saturday’s challenge. However, here is my answer.

1)   State pennants. Every time that we went traveled to a new state, I would find and buy one of those triangle pennants of that particular state. Sometimes I would get one for a region or a specific place that we visited. During my teenage years, I had a bedroom with the old wood paneling from the 1960s on it. I had all of the pennants taped up on the wall on display.

2)   Dolls. This collection was started for me when sometime when I was a toddler. I had two shadow boxes hung on the wall of my bedroom. In the boxes were displayed dolls dressed in the traditional costumes of different countries and cultures. I remember one that I think was English, in a fancy white dress. Another was representative of a traditional Spanish costume in a bright red dress with a black-netted hairpiece. There was a small wooden Mexican guy that was a prize in a breakfast cereal. When we traveled to Pennsylvania Dutch country, I got an Amish boy and girl. Overall, it was a very diverse and probably not very accurate collection.

While long gone, I do have a few dolls still. One is an antique that my paternal grandmother had that had been her step-aunts when she was a child. Another is a “Holly Hobby” doll that a woman, Virginia Greenfield, sewed for me in the 1970s. It is special in that while a teenager, Virginia had taken care of a baby—my mother.

3)   Books. Remember the Scholastic Book fliers that used to come out every month or so in elementary school? They were a small catalog of books that you could pick out the ones you wanted and as long as your parents gave you money to take to school on the proper day, you could order them! I circled any number of books on each flier and was allowed to actually buy 2 or 3 of them each time. Trips to the bookstore, holiday presents and the like added greatly to my collection. People must have seen the warning signs: All fiction was arranged on the bookshelves alphabetically by author. I had each book numbered and kept a list of them in numerical order. Yes, I was destined to become a librarian!

Where are they today? No longer on a handwritten list, but on a spreadsheet in my computer. Between my husband’s collection and mine, the numbers along the side have grown to be above 1200!

I have collected many other things over the years. Seashells along the beach, maps and brochures of trips, craft materials, and of course genealogy files among the rest! We try to keep the collections more or less contained, especially since there isn’t a lot of room in our house. One of the main non-genealogy collections is now my husband and I collect shot glasses of the various states that we have been to. Much like my earlier collection of pennants, they expand to cities and attractions from time to time. They sit in a display box hung on the dining room wall. The first one that I purchased was of North Carolina when we attended NGS at Raleigh in 2009, our first conference together!