heir·loom

noun \ˈer-ˌlüm\

1: a piece of property that descends to the heir as an inseparable part of an inheritance of real property

2: something of special value handed on from one generation to another

3: a horticultural variety that has survived for several generations usually due to the efforts of private individuals

On Sunday I posted this photograph to Facebook with the comment – new heirlooms.  The table was just finished by lifelong friend Russell Donelson.  He’s a contractor but is one of the best finish carpenters I know and he loves doing it.  He knew I wanted a table 3 years ago when we were doing the renovation on the room it’s in.  He got the rough lumber from a neighboring town and had it drying in his barn – waiting.  I had the base made in Vermont because the price was right and I wanted turned legs which Russell thought was a good idea.  He then went to work on the top.  The Friday before Thanksgiving I arrived at the house to see it sitting in the living room.  Visually it’s beautiful but when you touched it it was like silk.  I spent the next two days oiling and waxing and getting to know my new table top.  Rubbing and reading the wood.  This is one beautiful piece of furniture and is wonderful that it was made by a good friend who took pride not only in his work but in the provenance of the wood.

The hooked mat I made while Russ was making the table, it was a large surface that would be screaming for a runner.  I’ve just begun hooking rugs and thought this would look good.  It was a challenge I gave myself to get it finished by the time the table came into the living room.  It’s fun, relatively practical and I was only a week off in finishing it.

I was thinking about the things we put value on and why.  For me it’s so much of an emotional thing.  The table means a lot to me because of Russell but I also envision gatherings around it to eat, converse, play board games, bond with family and friends.  Over time it will mean much more to me then it does now and I’m hoping it will mean more to others as well.

The runner I see as one of those things that will be on the table for a while then be relegated to the closet until such a time when things are cleaned out and it gets passed to someone else who has a sentimental attachment to it because some great grandmother in the distant past made it.

There is a silver sugar spoon that my mother always had in her sugar bowl – it’s still in the kitchen.  On the handle are the initials W.R.C.  She told me that she always hoped that it belonged to some long lost relative but came to the realization that it stood for “Women’s Relief Corp”.  She always laughed about it.  Not too long ago I found a silver sugar spoon in the attic with all of  my great grandmother’s things and brought it home to use in my kitchen.  The initials on the handle are L.G.D.  I was doing some research on the Gilbert side of my family tree when I realized that the spoon had belonged to Lydia Gilbert Duncan (1811-1898), my third great aunt.  It was one of those fantastic moments of discovery in the family tree world but all I could think about was my mother wanting that family heirloom and it had been sitting in her attic all along.

“Family stories make the most valuable heirlooms.” (Author unknown)

On Sunday I decided it was time to get serious about this blog and have it be a repository of so many things about Rowe and Fort Pelham Farm.  This includes being more diligent with my photography.  I don’t know if it is because I was a photographer for so many years in a commercial situation where value was placed on minimal shots due to the expense of film and processing or that I just don’t place that much value on it anymore but I’ve all but stopped taking photographs.

This became so clear to me over the past weekend at a Words and Wool workshop I attended at Cold Antler Farm.  Jenna Woginrich had put together my dream day with her and two other bloggers I read every day.  They were all full of amazing information but also such dedication to their writing and their blogs.  The eye opener for me came from Jon Katz after the workshop broke and we were walking around Jenna’s farm.  He is fairly new to photography and was snapping away while we were outside.  I complemented him on his growth and style that I have been watching over the past few years.  He thanked me and said how much he loved the camera he was using and wanted to know what I shot with.  Dear God I thought, my phone, Instagram.  I was a little embarrassed.  We went on to talk about the quality of light and chasing it.  It was quite wonderful for me to meet such a gentle and generous man.

On the drive home though all I could think about was the difference between his style and mine.  He told me that sometimes he doesn’t even know he has a good photograph until he sees it on his computer, so much of it was luck.  I really think this is the difference in photographers that have spent their lives using film and the photographers that have come into it during the digital age.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my digital cameras.  Digital sets you free in a lot of respects, your shots are unlimited these days.  But is that really the way to be?

There was a light snowfall overnight Saturday to Sunday and I decided to take my phone (yes, my phone) out and take a couple of shots to put on Facebook.  My shots were limited, deliberate.  I didn’t load them onto a computer because there isn’t one available and part of me WANTS immediate results.  I also edit while I take photographs  – often deleting what I don’t want as I go along.  I probably took about 15 photographs in all yesterday and kept 8.  Of the 8 that I kept I would probably post 5.

I’m thinking maybe Jon has something good going on, everyone has their style, maybe I can really take something away from that experience.  Take more pictures.  I think maybe I’ll now look more at the opportunities to take a photograph but I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from trying to make every single shot count.  I think that method teaches you to slow down and see exactly what is in front of you and that, for me, is always what photography has been about.

I have been doing genealogy for well over 15 years.  These days I will do research obsessively for a few days then not come back to it for a few months.  There rarely are exciting breakthroughs anymore, I seem to be doing more cleaning up of things than finding new relatives and the new relatives I do find are so far removed that it almost isn’t worth writing them down.

Recently I decided to do the family tree of Fort Pelham Farm since Olive had written down so much about her family history.  All of what I had has to be considered oral history until it could be tied to public record so I started with Olive and worked my way back.  I now use Ancestry.com for most of my research because I can sit at my desk and pop in the information.  Through the miracle of the internet there  are records from our ancient past available at the click of a mouse, truly amazing.

I’ve been working on the Wright/Gould/Haynes tree for a while and today a name and place from the distant past popped up on the Gould side – Sarah Baker from Ipswich, MA born in 1640.  When I saw that she was from Ipswich in the mid 1600’s I wondered if my family and hers knew each other because so many of my mother’s relatives landed there at about the same time, so I opened my tree alongside of Olive’s.  My tree has an Elizabeth Baker born in Ipswich in 1645, they were sisters.  Our distant Ipswich relatives not only knew each other, they lived under the same roof.  John Baker (1598-1678) was Olive’s 5th great grandfather and my 9th.

I have known for a long time that if you trace someone’s lineage back far enough we are all related, this was just one of those happy little coincidences that make studying your family tree so much fun. (That and sometimes I feel like I work for CSI).  It also makes Fort Pelham Farm feel even more like a family home.

When I started this blog I thought I could at least contribute something on a weekly basis.  How wrong I was.  The summer arrived and with so many chores around the property this had to go on the back burner.   As of yesterday the garden is a memory.  I pulled everything except the carrots and rutabagas and will probably amend the soil and till it this coming weekend.  I was sad to see this garden go this year.  Some years are not as successful or beautiful.  This garden, for the most part, was a great one.  It was photographed often.  It yielded more produce than I even cared to preserve.  It was a place for the wildlife to leave clues to their existence but left me wondering weekly what had transpired in that patch while I was away or asleep.  Now I’m starting the plan for next spring – what to plant, where to plant it, how to lay it out so it will call me to photograph it once again.