By the wife of The Wordwright, Jean Steel Venrick

We are savers of family memorabilia. [This is probably the understatement of the year. – The Wordwright.) We also seemed to be the recipients of a great deal of the stuff called “memorabilia”. Not only do we have photos of many of my ancestors – grandparents on both sides, great grandparents and great, great grandparents.

I look at these photos and wonder what they were like; was great, great grandmother Hagley a pleasant person to be around? She looked like she might have had a trace of American Indian blood in her veins. I did not do genealogy back to the Mayflower, so I’m not sure. She must have been a Bible reader because two of her daughters were named after Job’s daughters: Jemimah and Keziah (Job 42:13, 14).

My father introduced me to his grandmother Elizabeth Arledge by telling stories about her. He talked so kindly of her and once wrote a poem about her. She and her husband raised a family of eight on a little hill farm in Hocking County, Ohio. I look forward to meeting her in Heaven.

Not only do I have photos of these people but I have switches of hair from my paternal great grandmothers and my paternal grandmother too. After finding these switches it prompted me to get the same from my mother and father, Bill and mine as well as our children (and their children too). I have what I call a “hair box” which is interesting to look at from time to time. Years ago, saving hair was an “in thing” and making pictures with the hair was a specialty. A friend of ours has just such a picture (“graphic” might be a better description), which she bought at a yard sale or antique store.

Among the keepsakes we have are autograph books from Bill’s great grandfather, J. R. Keadle, who taught school in Missouri. (J. R. Keadle attended Ohio University the year they first went co-educational and he traveled by horseback from Malta, Ohio to Athens [about 23 miles] – we have to guess that was a weekly trip rather than a daily trip as such a daily trip would not have been practical.) One of those books go back to 1859.What a treasure to look at the beautiful script they wrote. Why did he go to Missouri? We know my husband’s grandfather was born in Missouri, other than that we simply do not know why he went to Missouri to teach school moving his family all the way from the area of Zanesville or Corning, Ohio.

I have my own autograph book, written in the early 1940’s. So interesting to look at names and childhood friends.

Another treasure coming from my maternal grandmother’s side is the old German Bible that came across the ocean with my great, great grandparents. I am the fifth generation to have this Bible. So interesting to read the family records in it even though I can’t read the German text. In the family records one name has been “cut out”. Wonder why and who did the cutting? One of the persons in that list lived to be 96 years old, although her daughter claimed she was 100, so someone is a bit off in their chronology.

Then there are the family recipe books, recipes my grandmother and mother used. Another interesting derivation of details in the old books, recipes that give amounts of shortening “the size of a walnut” or recipes with no temperatures given because they used wood stoves. (As I typed this for my wife, I can remember seeing my mother testing the hotness of an iron by merely wetting the tips of her fingers with saliva and quickly tapping the hot surface of the iron – not sure if the sound of the saliva turning into steam was the clue or not. Obviously the iron my mother used did not have an accurate temperature control, or else this practice went back to Mother’s use of hand irons heated on top of a wood fired cook stove.)

I have a big cardboard box with these books and booklets in it, not only my grandmother’s and mother’s, but also Bill’s favorite cousin’s collection. I have the handwriting of these persons, my grandmother having a very neat, precise style. She only went through 8th grade of school but she surely learned her penmanship well.

There’s another box that would probably make you laugh – I call it “my soap box”. These items are in a “King Edward Imperial” cigar box (a near-antique in itself). The oldest soaps are two P & G, “the white naphtha soap” as the wrapper reads (P & G standing for Proctor & Gamble, a company still in business). These were found in the basement where my husband’s cousin lived and she’s been dead since September 1991. They have never been opened. I’m sure she quit using it when she switched to an automatic washer because along with the soap was found a kettle of clothespins and a length of clothesline wrapped around a device that you unwound and temporarily fastened the rope around some kind of pegs in the backyard. (Then you would re-use the yoke-shaped device to wind up the rope once again when the laundry was dry. There were two free-turning handles on this device but one is missing on the one we have – who knows how long that other handle has been missing!)

Other soaps I have are two bars of a homemade soap my father-in-law gave me around 1990. Also have a yellowed bar of Ivory (soap) we found at Bill’s Dad’s house, slightly used. The one that really takes the cake is a well used bar of Oil of Olay. This bar really brings us laughs because my father-in-law was using it on his face when he died at age 92, thinking it would get rid of his wrinkles! It did not work.

I also have a piece of “Fels Naphtha” my mother was using up until 1991 when she died. Someone may say, “Why keep such useless stuff?” Well, just looking at those “useless things” brings back memories of those people. Perhaps I feel a bit closer to them. I do not go around moping or feeling sad because they are gone from this earth; I know I’ll see them in Heaven.

So you see, our house is filled with reminders of our family. I can take a “Family Trip” any day I choose just by getting out a box, whether it is soap, hair or photographs.

Jean Steel Venrick
The Wordwright’s wife.