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From: <>
Subject: [GenChat-L] Preserving Family Documents...
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 07:49:56 EDT


Fellow Chatters,

A long time ago when I was on the GenChat list and it was brand new, we
discussed the sorts of dilemmas that we sometimes face with regard to family
shame and embarrassments of a particular nature...Documents, that is to say,
such as the photograph, some generations removed from me, of an ancestor, his
wife, and a neighbor woman of theirs...

I ended up not destroying the photograph, but kept it even though I neither
approve of that sort of photography nor want to know that my male ancestor was
the sort of man who would force his wife into such a disgraceful act...I
suppose I keep it for the same reason that I keep the transcripts and tapes of
conversations of some of my aunts and grandaunts of a great-grand-uncle who
attempted to molest them when they were little girls...Not from a morbid
interest, but because it was a part of his life that can, and is, known, and
affected the females of the family enough that they wanted to talk about it
fifty and more years later..."Don't let Uncle George be alone with you" they
were instructed almost from the cradle...How can you not record that, even
though it gives you the creeps?...

And I kept the newspaper clippings from when my Pentecostal-preacher uncle (by
marriage) was taken into custody not once, but on four different occasions,
because he generally matched the description of the Cincinnati Strangler (a
rapist who strangled his victims) and had a newspaper route that caused him to
circulate in the same general vicinity as most of the victims...Thankfully, he
was eliminated as a suspect, but he lost several secular jobs over it, and his
family life was strained terribly...How can you not record it?...

But what do you do with your parents' love letters?...My dad predeceased my
mother, and my mother and father kept all of the letters they exchanged while
they were courting, while they were engaged, and every time my dad had to
travel out of town (which was a good bit fairly early in his career, and early
in their marriage)...

I have no idea of what was said in those letters...Frankly, I don't think I
want to know...My dad was a very romantic man, and quite eloquent...I find
myself reacting to the idea of reading their letters the way our teenage sons
react when they see me hugging and kissing my wife - I roll my eyes, my
stomach flips over, and I feel as if I'm going to lose lunch...A juvenile
reaction, but there are some things that children need not know about their
parents...

I know my parents had sex, but I don't need to see a video...

So what do I do with the love letters?...

My mother asked that my wife and I destroy them after she dies...She has not
looked at them, so far as I can tell, since the late 1960's - the same faded
ribbons still tie them all together, and there's no sign of the knots having
been retied...If she wanted them destroyed, it would seem to me that she would
dispose of them herself before her death - especially if she doesn't intend to
look at them any more often than every thirty years or so...And I'm loathe to
destroy them because they record a significant part of my parents' lives, or
so I suppose...They are history...In our family, they're an insight into the
hearts of my parents the way that Sullivan Ballou's letter was an insight into
his heart more than 135 years ago...

Perhaps I hope to find a letter like Sullivan Ballou's...

How would you deal with this?...

Chas

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