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Saturday, November 26, 2005The Christmas season is loaded with chores to do, parties to attend, gifts to buy, and houses to decorate, that the spirit of the holiday often gets lost in the clamor. But Thanksgiving is just Thanksgiving. A day (or two or three) to spend with family and loved ones with none of the outside distractions. And in my family, it always seems to turn to a day of remembrances of family past. Every year, my mom seems to pull something new from the family archives. One year, it was a genealogy painstakingly gathered by one of her aunts that traced their family back to the 1600's. This year, it was her grandmother's scrapbook. It was filled with old photographs from long ago, when boys wore knee britches and babies wore long white gowns, and newspaper clippings from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950's. Reading those newspaper clippings, it's striking how much newspapers have changed in the past 100 years. The obituaries, for one, were much more detailed than they are today, with causes of death not only listed, but the doctor quoted for attribution, and with details of the life you don't often see today for ordinary people. There was the obituary for my great-great grandfather, a farmer, which described his death from Bright's disease, and referred to him as a "life-long Republican," - having voted in his first election for Abraham Lincoln. Not long after that election, he was fighting in Mr. Lincoln's War, or, as the newspaper put it - "gave three years of his young manhood to his Nation." There was the obituary of his son, who died from an "acute attack of angina pectoris," and who, it said, was an invalid all of his life. And there was the clipping about one of my uncles who served in the Korean War. It said his parents had just learned that he had survived the Battle of Old Baldy. You never read local news like that today. Today, our soldiers only make the local paper (and the national papers) if they die. posted by Sydney on 11/26/2005 08:13:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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