My mom is moving to a retirement community very soon and has begun downsizing in earnest. She’s pragmatic about what she can and can’t bring with her, and that means a lot of things are being sold or donated. Still, there are plenty of heirlooms and keepsakes that she doesn’t want to see discarded. Even though she moved out of the family house in the late 1990s, there’s still a lot of stuff.
Her grandfather’s writing desk is going to my brother, and childhood items (baby blankets, report cards, toys, etc) are being returned to each of us. As the family historian, still more is coming into my house.
She gave me a half dozen bundles of spoons. Most of them are beautiful, but bear no marks indicating where they came from. However, there are four gems. One is a spoon with my great-grandmother Olive’s wedding year engraved on the handle. The other three are the baby spoons of my great-aunt, Beatrice Elizabeth Warner. They are dated 1910, 1913, and 1915. Aunt Bea, as I and everyone else called her, was born in Brooklyn, NY and lived for most of her life in Cranford, NJ. She was an educator, who travelled all over the world. As she never married, her niece eventually inherited a number of her things.
Now they’ve made their way to her great-niece, and I’ve begun searching for a new display case to house these treasures.