Photoessay #2067 - Leaving a trace ... for who?

Almost all women of a certain age share a challenge.  We have hundreds of pictures of ourselves and our families.  We feel a need to organize and package them because ... why?

We want to remember?  We want our children to remember?  Our great great grandchildren?  Do we long for similar documentation from our forebears?

Doesn't this drive historians and genealogists?

Do we have any idea who we are leaving this to?  Haven't we all been in a situation where a departed friend or family member has left pictures.  But we now don't feel any connection or we don't know who they are.  So we must discard them.  Seems like a shame but we can't be held hostage.

So we do work on our own documentation (or our own blog????) because we have an uncertain strong sense that we must leave a trace.  Make a mark.  Leave some of ourselves and our endeavors.  Someone will care.  Someone will be glad to have all these baby pictures.  My parents did it.  I do it.

I've been working on Maier Zunder (1829-1901) for over a year and a little long before that.  My great great grandfather.

I was just in New Haven.  I was thrashing around and found my focus just at the end.  Now I know what I really wanted so will have to make another trip though I probably have almost all of it already.

I've driven a certain number of people around me a little nuts with all of my Maier Zunder materials.  And I talked to the very few people in New Haven this past week who also appreciated him.

People sometimes ask me, "do you feel a personal connection with him, do you think he's glad you are doing this."  I have answered, "No, he likely wouldn't have paid much attention to me, a girl.  And, even though I've collected a lot of information, I don't really know him."

But now, I'm changing my orientation.  At the last minute on my New Haven trip, I realized that Maier had kept his own scrapbooks.  The citations and dates are in his own hand (I'm pretty sure, not sure how to really substantiate that).  So he chose what went in there (mostly newspaper articles, he was a very public man) and what to leave out.  He labeled them with the publication and date.

Why do you think he kept those scrapbooks?  Why did he want to document these affairs?  Did he have any more of an idea than we have?

Or was he leaving them for me?  For me, Sandy, his great great grandaughter.

OK, it's unlikely but, for the first time, I think that he made these scrapbooks for me to find and to write about.

Could happen....could he true.  Might be.

Picture from the scrapbooks of Maier Zunder, annotated by him.  Article about the devotional exercise controversy.  He had a major role.