I’ve had my safety deposit box for years, and to be honest, it’s been a long time since I went and looked at it. This week, I decided that, now that I’ve moved, I should relocate the things in it to a location closer to home.
I recalled that I’d put some of my favorite old family photos in the box, but after that, I didn’t really recall, so some of the things were a bit of a surprise.
Cora, Harry, and another mystery photo of children, I still don’t know the relationship to our family.
There is a picture of Cora and Harry, along with a note on the back. I don’t know who Cora and Harry are, but I do know that they were somehow connected to my dad’s mom’s side of the family. I really looked at the photo and even had a few photo detectives look at it … (including Maureen Taylor).
In the background, you can see old lamplights and an old car, as well as some palm trees. Cora writes on the back that “a friend of ours finished off a couple of the snaps for us a little larger. C.B. I wish I had pulled my skirt down a little,” and my great-grandmother or grandmother wrote This is Cora and Harry with their chili Con Carne Lunch room in the background.
We know that Cora and Harry’s last name starts with “B”, but I’ve never come across anyone in my tree with those names.
These two postcards are from France in 1916. My great-grandfather, Jesse Oliver, sent the one on the left to my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Alice, in June 1916 so that it would arrive for her birthday on July 26. The one on the right is for my grandmother, Gladys. It’s signed “Dear Gladys, from her loving daddy, with best wishes”. Since Jesse served from 1915 to 1919, I am unsure of the exact date for the card, but it could have been from the same year, 1916, as my great-grandmother’s.
The reason the one on the right is so dirty is that I found it in the dirt at my grandparents’ farm many years after they had passed away (I think it was at least 15 years after), and the farmhouse was no longer there. When my grandparents had died, my dad’s family had left things in the house, and someone had broken in and taken the trunks that I remember being in the spare room, and obviously, some things had been left to the wind. Luckily I’d found it.
When I use Google Lens to identify these items, I’m told they are religious antique Catholic scapular relic shrine cards. These are from my mother’s father’s side of the family. My grandfather, Francis (Frank), was raised Catholic, and I have another book … hmmm somewhere .. that is also his. Included in the tiny box with these items is a metal pendant.
Also in the safety deposit boxes are coins and stamps that I’ve collected. Empress of Ireland stamps that I purchased in 2014 to commemorate the ship’s 100th anniversary. I bought them because my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Alice, had sailed on that ship to come to Canada. There is also a coin from Queen Elizabeth’s 80th birthday in 2006 and a five-dollar coin from the Montreal Olympics in 1976 that I’d won, and finally two Morgan silver dollars that I’d collected for no apparent reason other than they are old and I like anything old. One is from 1879 and the other from 1900.
I was chatting with my cousins and wondered why we keep certain things and what will happen to them in the future. My family growing up was all about stories, and I do my best to capture the stories and preserve them. But do the things need to be preserved, or should I let them go? I have an album in my FOREVER account called Heirloom, and I believe I’ve created stories about these things, except for the shrine cards.
For now, while I think about this, these items will be stored in the new safety deposit box closer to my new home, and I’ll update my asset sheet with the new address. If you’d like a copy of my Digital Asset Checklist, you can find it HERE.
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