I am sitting here, in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by boxes. I am staying at home for the holidays for the next two weeks, and in the few days I've been here, I have not been able to stop myself from opening up a few of them and poking around inside. One was filled with reams of sheet music, and another filled with shoe boxes neatly packed with cassette tapes. The best boxes are marked with that magic word (for me, at least): genealogy.
[Although I never met her, I know from experience that these particular boxes contain the collected work of my great-grandmother Millie, whose passion was researching the family tree and collecting stories and photographs from the generations past.]
The first one I rummaged through yielded a photo album in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a short collection of every contribution my great-great grandfather, Frank Albert Ernst, wrote to the class letter of McCormick Theological Seminary, class of 1892. They start in 1893 when he was called to the then-new territory of Nebraska, and continue well into his eighties, just one paragraph a year describing what church he was serving, how many new members they had added, and the state of health of his immediate family. It shouldn't have been as interesting as it was, but I spent several solid hours reading it from cover to cover.
Other than that, the stuff in that box was a completely boring collection - old letters, random snapshots, and newspaper front pages from important dates like JFKs assassination or the moon walk.
Knowing that they more than likely contain piles of useless paper, what is it about these boxes that I find fascinating? And once inside, what is it that distinguishes a single meaningful piece of ephemera from a pile of old rubbish?
I am once again pondering the idea of place, and how this new set of questions fits into it. In my thesis presentation in November, I talked about my working definition of place as a set of four things:
Having had several weeks to ponder it, I begin to wonder how much place, for me, is becoming space with memory.
[Although I never met her, I know from experience that these particular boxes contain the collected work of my great-grandmother Millie, whose passion was researching the family tree and collecting stories and photographs from the generations past.]
The first one I rummaged through yielded a photo album in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a short collection of every contribution my great-great grandfather, Frank Albert Ernst, wrote to the class letter of McCormick Theological Seminary, class of 1892. They start in 1893 when he was called to the then-new territory of Nebraska, and continue well into his eighties, just one paragraph a year describing what church he was serving, how many new members they had added, and the state of health of his immediate family. It shouldn't have been as interesting as it was, but I spent several solid hours reading it from cover to cover.
Other than that, the stuff in that box was a completely boring collection - old letters, random snapshots, and newspaper front pages from important dates like JFKs assassination or the moon walk.
Knowing that they more than likely contain piles of useless paper, what is it about these boxes that I find fascinating? And once inside, what is it that distinguishes a single meaningful piece of ephemera from a pile of old rubbish?
I am once again pondering the idea of place, and how this new set of questions fits into it. In my thesis presentation in November, I talked about my working definition of place as a set of four things:
- about people
- built out of narrative
- instills belonging
- develops a history over time
Having had several weeks to ponder it, I begin to wonder how much place, for me, is becoming space with memory.