Some more reflections on my family

For the last several days my siblings and I have been breaking down a house that has been in our family for 85 years. That meant taking 6500 pounds of junk to the landfill. It meant taking about 1000 pounds of stuff to Goodwill - so much stuff that none of us will be able to claim it all.

But it also meant finding some odd and curious stuff. For example, it meant finding a Zilotone toy from the 1930s which still works. I also found a ton of other toys. We gave away a lot of them.

We also found two company logos for my great-grandfather's construction company. I took the one that was painted steel and one of my brothers took the one done as a mirror. He (Daniel Anderson Garber) was a founder of the Association of General Contractors. We found a typed manuscript of a trip that he and his wife took across the US and then through the Panama canal. (A lot of his commentary was about engineering - especially the Panama Canal) - but the trip stops when he gets back to Florida - I wonder how the rest of the trip went.

We each took a selection of furniture, china and linens and books and records - some important, most mundane. UPS got a lot of business but so will a local moving company.

We had (the four siblings) two excellent dinners at places we had eaten before - with a lot of good talk - about the economy, about the meaning of family.

My sister came in December and organized many of the books (that was a great contribution) - that part of the family were avid readers. I would have loved to have been able to go through those with more care than I did. I chose a set of Dickens (there were three) - each of them was well read. That part of the family would actually sit in the living room and read to each other. My two aunts who were the last residents of the house - told stories about that.

We found my mother's Master's hood from the University of Michigan - in Music and a ton of letters. My sister volunteered to take those and sort them over time.

One of my ancestors (William Penn Abbott) who was a minister who died in 1878, had a volume published at his death which records a lot about his life and also the funeral orations at his services and then I found a New York Times story on his death.

With all the stuff - I found myself less interested in the objects and more interested in thinking about my ties to this generation and to the several represented in this house. I found myself regretting that we did not have the great legacy from my father's side of the family - we know something about my grandparents but not much before then. On my mother's side there are stories going back well into the 1830s.