Storytelling With the Ancestors

Category: grandmother

  • Discovering Family Treasures: An Archival Journey

    Discovering Family Treasures: An Archival Journey

    What began as “I really should organize these old family photographs” has somehow turned into a full-scale archival project.

    At last count, I have scanned, catalogued, and sleeved about 150 photographs, newspaper clippings, programs, documents, and assorted family treasures dating from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth. Each item gets a catalog number and a digital copy, and many of the photographs have also been carefully restored.

    The collection is beginning to divide itself naturally into family branches: The patriarchal branch of the Chapmans and Fenstermakers, and the matriarchal branch of the Youngs and Hancocks.… Read the rest

  • A Return to Youngs Creek

    A Return to Youngs Creek

    Tucked away among the rolling hills of southern Indiana, the forests, fields, and quiet cemeteries shaped the lives of my ancestors who settled here, raised their children, and left behind a legacy that still echoes through the landscape.

    This short video is a journey back to those places. Through historic family photographs and the timeless beauty of the Hoosier National Forest, it is both a tribute to the ancestors who came before us and a reminder that, sometimes, the strongest connection to our past is found simply by walking where they once walked.… Read the rest

  • For the First Time, They Had a Voice

    For the First Time, They Had a Voice

    On November 2, 1920, several women in my family entered a voting booth for the first time.

    For modern Americans, it is difficult to imagine reaching adulthood, marrying, raising children, paying taxes, and helping build a community without ever having the right to vote. Yet that was the reality for generations of American women before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

    Among those newly enfranchised voters was my second great-grandmother, Martha Tarr Ferguson.… Read the rest

  • Family Lore: Secrets from Southern Indiana

    Family Lore: Secrets from Southern Indiana

    The Family Lore

    On a recent trip to visit family in southern Indiana, a cousin shared a deliciously scandalous story about my grandparents that sounded almost too cinematic to be true.

    According to family lore, my grandparents — both teenagers at the time — quietly defied the law, her Baptist preacher father, and most of Orange County by slipping away to Jeffersonville, Indiana for a secret marriage that caused family outrage for years afterward.… Read the rest