Thursday, March 3, 2016

Treasure Chest Thursday: Mary Theresa's Scrapbooks

Treasure Chest Thursday is a daily prompt at Geneabloggers encouraging bloggers to create a post with the main focus being a family treasure, an heirloom or even an everyday item important to the family.

Two scrapbooks full of cards! The pages are falling out. The pages are brittle. My chair and floor are littered with brown chips of scrapbook pages whenever I handle these books. But already I have a new impression of the kind of woman my great-grandmother Mary Theresa Sheehan Killeen Walsh was. I had always imagined a stern matriarch, cold and demanding, a faithful Catholic, judgmental of anyone who strayed.




However, these cards reveal a much warmer and more loving woman than the one I created in my mind. The cards are witness to a close and loving relationship with her daughters, her sister, her nieces and nephews. Mary Theresa was loved. She was sentimental. She loved her family beyond measure.

The scrapbooks also hold clues that have answered some questions about Mary Theresa’s sisters and their families. A card from “Sr. Vincent Carmel Byrnes” – why, that’s Sadie BYRNES, not Sadie BURNS like someone had written on a photo (I knew Sadie grew up to be a nun). A card from “Pat and Peggy Byrnes” – could this be Sadie’s brother? Indeed it is. That helped me find Sadie’s family, but that is a story for another day.

© 2016, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.

8 comments:

  1. My eyes are popping out of my head! Incredible treasure. I know what you mean about the flakes of paper, I have a few albums that shed black paper whenever and no matter how carefully I handle them.

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    1. I'm glad I'm not the only one with poorly preserved scrapbooks. I feel like the acid-free police will be after me.

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  2. Oh my goodness, that is really something special. I have a few boxes of my grandmother's old cards and letters that I treasure going through from time to time, but she never put them together like this.

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    1. Not too late to put them in a scrapbook or feature them in your blog!

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  3. It just amazes me the care she did to keep her cards like that. Glad you are having a different picture of her as you get to "know" her better through these cards.

    betty

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    1. It amazes me too because I am not a card saver. Now I think maybe I should be.

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  4. What a treasure. Maybe you mentioned in an earlier post that I haven't yet read but if not, how did the album come into your hands? Lucky, lucky your for all the information you can glean from this, especially family names and the personality of your great-grandmother.

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    1. My dad's sister had them in a suitcase tucked away in a closet. She decided to do a little housecleaning and knew I would appreciate them. Since my cousins are not very interested in family history, she gave them to me. Perfect timing, I would say.

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