What heirlooms do you have in your family? This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver wants to see the heirlooms readers have been discussing:
Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission: Impossible! music, please!):
(1) Last week we shared the heirlooms that we inherited or obtained from our families.
(2) This week, please show a photograph of one or two of them.
(3) Share your cherished heirloom(s) in your own blog post, on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments.
In previous posts about heirlooms I have written about the silverplate dinner flatware and the earring I have left (as the other one was stolen, along with a necklace) that used to be my great-grandmother's. But I also have lots of photographs, primarily from my maternal grandmother's family. I think my favorite photograph is this one:
This scan is only of the actual photo and does not include the card backing. The front of that backing indicates that the photo was taken in Kamenets Podolskiy, Russia, now Kamyanets Podilskyy, Ukraine. Because of clear resemblances of the adults in the photo (the man to a known, identified photo of my great-great-grandfather and the woman to one of my great-grandfather's younger sisters), I am fairly certain that these are my great-great-grandparents Vigdor Gorodetsky and Esther Leah (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky, and that the little girl is their first child, Etta (my great-grandfather's older sister). That makes the photo about 130 years old at this point. Esther Leah died in 1908 in Kishinev, Russia (now Chisinau, Moldova), and soon after that the chain migration of that branch of my family to this country began.
Genealogy is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't have the box top, so you don't know what the picture is supposed to look like. As you start putting the puzzle together, you realize some pieces are missing, and eventually you figure out that some of the pieces you started with don't actually belong to this puzzle. I'll help you discover the right pieces for your puzzle and assemble them into a picture of your family.
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I just love old photographs!
ReplyDeleteLittle Etta is adorable and the photo looks to be in excellent condition. It's a great heirloom to have.
ReplyDeleteWell, the photo has several scratches, but I had the scan professionally "touched up" because I consider the photo to be so important. But I agree, it is a great heirloom.
DeleteThat's a very nice treasure to have! Photos are better than things.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about it that way, but they really are better in some ways, aren't they?
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