GenChat-L Archives

From: <>
Subject: [GenChat-L] Hairwork of all sorts
Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 13:15:23 EDT

Fellow Chatters,

A number of folks have written to me for the web sites URLs for hairwork
jewelry, information, and ornaments of various sorts. For those of you who
are interested in seeing hair jewelry, or making hair jewelry, or just to see
what mourning jewelry, "remembrance" jewelry, hair jewelry, and other hairy
ornaments look like, I've posted a number of web sites for your reference.

Please bear in mind that these sites are mixed in nature: some are
commercial, and some are not.

The relevance that hairwork has to genealogy is that some of the pieces that
my family has are made from our ancestors' hair, and some hairwork made from
our hair will be given to our descendants one day. It's interesting to see
how very red my maternal grandmother's hair was, and how black her mother's
hair was while her father's hair was just as fiery as her own. My maternal
grandfather said of his first view of my grandmother that he was a gang chief
on the railroad when he first met her - he just 17 and she barely 13 - and
she was cooking for the line hands on the railroad as her occupation. His
first day on the job on that particular spur, he and his men (three other
young men) were waiting for their breakfast to be brought out to them when my
grandmother, a wooden yoke over her shoulders carrying the two tin pails full
of food she had made for the railroad gang, crested the hill. He said that
her hair looked like the sun set afire coming over that hill. They married
four months later when he was 17 years, 8 months old and she was 13 years, 5
months old.

My grandmother's hair still looks like the sun set afire in the hairwork
jewelry piece we have from her hair, and my wife says she sees the traces of
that heritage in my hair.

My wife and I have a number of pieces of hairwork made from our own hair, as
well as having made silhouettes of all of our children and ourselves at
two-year intervals. We've made three silhouettes of our almost 22-month-old
granddaughter already, and plan to keep up the practice. They're more
interesting in their own way than photographs.

We also have three different life masks made of each of us, but not of our
granddaughter (she's way too young). I started the practice when our
youngest boy was six and our daughter (our oldest child) was 15, and it
turned out to be a treasured and unique gift to my wife. I was able to
prevail on her to let me make one of her, too, so that we'd have a complete
set. We've even hung the sets on one of our walls at different points in our
decorating-redecorating-redecorating process, but finally decided against
continuing to risk breaking them. Besides, they really didn't fit into that
wall's theme of dead ancestors.

Chas

http://www.hairwork.com/more.html

http://www.hairwork.com/book/book.htm

http://www.hairwork.com/hairwork/index.html

http://www.hairwork.com/gordon/tables.htm

http://www.hairwork.com/frmain.htm

http://www.opengroup.com/~open/aabooks/157/1574320491.shtml

http://www.hairwork.com/hairwork.htm

http://www.hairwork.com/book/Braidbook.html

http://www.hairwork.com/book/hair.htm

http://www.thingsgoneby.com/fine/mourning.htm

http://www.hairwork.com/guestlog.htm

http://www.hairwork.com/book/sentimental_jewellery_by_ann_lou.html

http://www.kaleden.com/publications/news/aw/aw_issues/mourning.htm

http://www.hairworksociety.or

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