Aunt Mary

I spent the day with my 82 year-old aunt. This is my mom's older sister who lives in Montclair, California. She has, in her possession, about 70 letters written between 1911 and 1927 to my grandfather (we'll call him "Ol' Wally") from his peeps back in North Carolina. For someone interested in their family history, Mary's stash is the proverbial goldmine. No lie. I've learned some stuff from these things.

I visited Mary back in October and thought I had scanned at least half of them. No dice, brothers and sisters. On that trip, I scanned 118 pages worth of letters. Today, I got 260 pages! For you non-mathematical folk, that's an increase of 120% in scanned correspondence between Henry Elmer, John Henry, Irvin, Janie, Edgar, Mary, etc. to my grand pappy. Nice, huh?

For having to deal with me in her house for the day, I offered to take Mary to lunch. Lunch turned out to be a 6-inch turkey sandwich from Subway. I had a five-dollar footlong. It's the clever jingle that hooked me. But I digress...

I still have to make another trip to Mary's when we get back from Palinland to scan more items, but it shouldn't take nearly as long. Hopefully this time I'll be able to treat her to something a little better than jingle sandwiches.

We're getting up at 5 a.m. to head to the airport for our flight to Anchorage. I'll post more of Julia's vacation photos later.

The photo above is my Aunt Mary as a senior in high school in 1945.