Is Meets Was

On Chauncey Street, we graduated from an icebox to a refrigerator in the dining room.   My parents were married for twenty-five (25) years before they owned an electric toaster.   I remember the way we used to make toast. My mother had a wire rack that she placed on the gas burner of the stove. She placed the bread on the wire rack where it would get warm and finally toast on one side. Then Mom turned the bread over to toast the other side. To whip cream, my mother had a beater that she manually turned and turned. It took a lot of elbow grease to whip the cream until it was soft and fluffy and formed perfect white peaks. The used grease and lard didn’t go to waste. We sold it to the local butcher who used it to make soap for the American troops fighting overseas in World War II. The original stove we had was the same as the stoves in the other units. It was porcelain-clad iron. The color was cream and green. It was “T” shaped in appearan...

I am writing these anecdotes for all my children and grandchildren, and especially for Billy who asked how people kept things cold before there were refrigerators.    My earliest memory of iceboxes is of the white porcelain, two-door affair we had on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my earliest memories were formed there, at 324 Chauncey Street. The top level of the ice box, where many subsequent refrigerators have the freezer compartment, is where the blocks of ice went. The bottom compartment was where items such as milk, butter, meat, etc. were stored. Under the icebox was a pan to catch the melting ice. It had to be emptied daily. The iceman came around in a horse-drawn wagon, and a few years later he arrived in a motorized truck. He came a couple of times a week in the summer and maybe once a week in the winter. The amount of ice delivered depended on the amount of money our mother had on hand for such a luxury. For a quarter (25 cents), she could buy ...

It has been over a year since I created a blog post, and I am still suffering from writer's block. Rather than leaving this blog dormant any longer,   I am pursuing a wonderful alternative that presented itself at a family reunion this past summer. I was reunited with my cousin, Patsy, who has written a poignant series of stories about her childhood, living on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn, New York. I was enthralled by the incite that these stories provide into the lives of those who I knew so well and yet so little. I look forward to sharing with you  Remembering Chauncey Street by Patricia Jones [Pat Aronica] . On Tuesday, for the next 15 weeks, I will post on this blog, each of the anecdotes written by Patsy about her life on Chauncey Street from the middle 1940s through the 1950s. Photo of many of my cousins who gathered in Andover, NH for a family reunion in July 2013. Many others, who were unavailable when this picture was taken, w...

This has been a very hard and strange week with the passing of my Mom . My heart is broken, and my brain has turned to mush. If we live long enough, each of us goes through this passage, but that doesn't make it any easier when it is our turn. Below is a video with photographs of my Mom taken throughout her life. Goodnight Mom. I love you. © 2012, Cathy H Paris

The Parkinsons' Plot, photograph furnished by Green-Wood If you have ancestors who lived in Manhattan or Brooklyn, New York, a must-place to look for their burial site is in beautiful and historic  Green-Wood Cemetery . I found the burial location of my Great Great Grandfather,  Henry Parkinson (1828 - 1870) , and other family members. This morning I was saddened to read about vandalism at Green-Wood. In 2003, my husband and I visited Green-Wood, along with my cousin's daughter, Wendy Marinaccio. We went there in search of Henry's gravesite and in search of the gravesite of my Great Grandparents, Andrew Nimmo (1864-1912) and Kate Parkinson (1865-1915). We never did find Henry's resting place, but afterwards Green-Wood sent me the above photograph of the Parkinson's plot. Here I am in 2003, happy to be looking for the Parkinsons. Here is Wendy. We didn't find the Parkinsons. Little did we know that we were just on the wrong side of the path....

Mystery Photo A few years ago, I met a second cousin, and we shared old photos. We both had a copy of the same photograph of an elegant, old New England home. His photograph was inherited from his mother. Mine came from my grandparents' album which had been passed to my aunt and then to me. Naturally, neither photograph is labelled, and the significance of this old house to our family history remains a mystery. My cousins grandfather, Harry Merrill, and my grandfather, Fred Merrill, were brothers. The brothers were both born and raised in Franklin, New Hampshire. Their mother's maiden name was Carroll.  If you recognize the house in this photograph, please contact me . Thanks goes to the Franklin Historical Society for posting a copy of this mystery photo on their website. © 2012, Cathy H Paris

I haven't written an article for my blog in months, and how shocked I was to find nothing on the front page! Thank goodness articles may still be reached through the dynamic keyword link in the left margin. It is time to get busy and start writing about family history again. Hopefully by writing this post, I will return IsMeetsWas to life. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could rejuvenate ourselves so easily? The absence of articles is not a reflection of my inactivity. Most recently, I am lost in tons of busy work, massaging the over 9000 names of places in my database on Family Tree Maker.  I have reduced the number of place names to under 6000, but I still have more place names demanding my attention. I am concerned about the loss of the historical integrity of the names of places as I strive for consistency and update the place names to make them recognizable to online maps. Often as I make changes, I have included the old name of the place in the descriptive f...