In my family, both immediate and more broadly, I have the
reputation as the one to whom family items can be entrusted. Relatives near (my parents, uncles, aunts) and
more distant (a half-second-cousin once removed, for example) have given me
family artefacts, papers, books and other objects over the years. I’ve been
fortunate to obtain objects from all four branches of my family. (See my post Getting Started and Getting
Organized for more information on how I segment my family research into four
branches.)
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| RMS Carpathia in New York after rescuing survivors of the Titanic disaster |
From my Woodruff side, I have inherited a large collection
of china that came (I had thought) from the family of my dad’s father. I didn’t believe there was much handed down
from my dad’s mother and assumed the china was all from my grandfather. Although my grandmother was born into a
wealthy Canadian family, her family lost everything in the 1929 stock market
crash when she was 16 years old. The
following year, she moved to the States and started out on her own in New York
City (see my post The Life of an Aspiring Actress – New York in the 1930s). I always believed that she didn’t bring anything
from her family, as they weren’t in a position to keep much. Her mother went from living in a mansion with
servants to living with strangers, her husband having abandoned her after
losing the fortune, in boarding houses, so I knew that it was unlikely she
would have had any fine china to give her daughter. I proved to be wrong about this assumption when
I researched my Woodruff china and found a possible connection to my
grandmother’s family and the Carpathia, the famous ship that rescued survivors
of the Titanic.
