WHO WILL REMEMBER?

Yesterday was a lovely sunbeam-filled day, with the bright-off-the-snow beams through the sheers onto our Birthday Table for Sweetpea's Mom.    We'd ordered some of her preferred dishes from our favorite Chinese place, and they picked it up on their way over.

Sweetpea came in wearing a favorite old camo shirt of her Ganner's---one she'd worn many times dragging the floor for sleepovers, and now just right for her grown-up self.   It set the conversation to family and who was who, and names---her sweet first Granddad, gone from us way to soon at thirty, decades before she was born.   And it all just spread to name after name in that big group back in Mississippi, and one charming coincidence that both my Mothers-in-law had practically the same name---Blanche White and Clara White---and so Sweetpea had two Grandmothers literally named "White White."

We just kept bringing up the names, and I had a little frisson of how Davidge must have felt reeling off the Jeriba line for Zammis' acceptance to the Holy Council of Draco. 

And so, this still-frosty eight-degree's morning, and especially after reading MISS MERRY'S  post of her own research, and her entreaties for Identifying-them-while-you-still-can,   I went back and read over a post here, from exactly fifteen years ago, hoping that it would inspire folks to identify and give names and life to their own Ancestors.  

From LAWN TEA,   January 4, 2011: 

My Sis in San Antonio has done a wonderful research into our family's genealogy, even going to Salt Lake City to that biggest-trove-of-info-in-the-country for a week and barricading herself with files and wills and pictures and transcripts and TREES. And their trip to Ireland was a trove of information fromall the "Murphree side" of Daddy's family.    We have boxes and boxes of pictures of our own, from both sides, though not nearly as many from Daddy's side. What there are of his go back only to those more recent Kodak moments of sepia or black-and-white, with folks squinting into the sun as a long shadow reaches from camera to their feet. Most of those little rectangles have a tiny black-and-white checkery border, and lots in the boxes attest their having been ripped from their life-in-scrapbooks, for many corners still bear the tiny pointed black ears of the wee stick-on brackets which affixed many a picture to a blotter-black page.

We marvel at the facial expressions, the clothes, the fading draperies and tattered flowers of the stage-set of the early photos, and also think that perhaps this might be the only picture of those people that there is. In this day when our Grands have developed a permanent flinch-and-blink when Ganner approaches with the camera, and our own archives of holidays and vacations and just plain Tuesday have reached thousands in number---it's sad that our forebears in their one fading black-and-white, struck still and motionless by the gravity and the luxury of the thing, are fading as people, as well, for after our generation---who will know their names?

We're into doing a lot of picture-identifying, and I wish previous generations had done so. We've been writing names on the back of all the pics we can identify. I wish also that everybody with boxes and albums and framed pictures---I'm talkin' even that great huge family portrait from 1888 that's in the flaky old frame over the mantel, and might collapse in your hands if you take it apart---I WISH you'd write the names on the back of your pictures, or at least on a piece of paper adhered to the picture. Or even stuck in an envelope WITH the picture.

Y'ALL!   Let's name some names!