Family History Friday- "The Three Quarters"

I apologize for my family history absence. I've been a bit distracted these past few weeks and haven't done much in that area. I promised I would be better this week and then realized that today was Friday...


Josh was out of town Monday through Thursday. I really dislike being apart from him. With the help of great friends and some addicting books (the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer) I was able to survive his absence. Unfortunately the books took up all my extra time that I should have spent doing some family history.


I thought though, that I would share a picture that my grandma gave me a few years back. It is of myself and my maternal grandparents. My grandma calls it the Three Quarters picture because each of us in the picture has a quarter blood from some country. I am a quarter Palestinian Arab, my grandma a quarter Irish, and my grandpa a quarter English. The picture was taken in July of 1982 in Decatur, Illinois and hung on my grandma's wall from then until 2005 when she passed it on to me.

I am grateful not only for the picture and the people in the picture but also the story behind it's history. It makes me so sad to go through the antique stores and see old photos of people who are now name-less and family-less with a price tag on them. If I could claim them as my own they would be priceless to me.


So amid all this rambling is my plea for you to do something to preserve and label your pictures. Not only the current ones of yourself and your family but also the old ones that are stashed away somewhere of your parents, grandparents, etc. There are so many ways to preserve them, do anything that works for you.


I am dying to get my grandma's pictures scanned and digitized. I cam across a site, mypublisher.com, last week that prints photo books. They have a special layout for vintage photos. You simply upload them into the layouts, adjusting as you desire, submit it online and they will print you as many copies as you like in a variety of formats. There are also other websites that will do the same thing. It seems like a great way to share all the photographs with multiple generations. That's my dream!