A Treasure Trove of Family and Community History

Family, I‘ve been in genealogy heaven for a little over a month now, and I have to tell you why! (Or, at least those of you who haven’t already been cornered by me. Sorry/Thanks!)

 

ONE stack of funeral programs from the Willie Mae Davis Allen Genealogical Collection, generously shared by Cousin Barney Allen.

Back in February, I had to head down to DC for a work event. Now, I love visiting DC for so many reasons – the museums, the libraries and archives, the architecture, the history, and just strolling through some of the fun and funky neighborhoods. But one of the best things about visiting the city is that I have family there, and a lot of it. You see, my mom was born in DC, and through her mother, father, and step-mother, there are cousins upon cousins upon first- and second- and half- and step- and twice- and thrice-removed cousins there. So, when I head down, I’ll often make an effort to hang with family.

Grandma Doris - More Bowling Pins!

I posted a few weeks ago about the stash of bowling pins - the kind you wear, not the kind you knock down - my mom and I came across as we went through some of my Grandma Doris' things while prepping for a flea market. Grandma passed away at the beginning of April and a LOT of her things ended up with us.

(Side Note: If her spirit was watching from somewhere, seeing us getting ready for a flea market probably made Grandma smile a little bit - I'm pretty sure half her adult life was spent at flea markets, selling Mary Kay and an assortment of thingimbobs.)

Anyway, Grandma didn't just bowl, she lived bowling - and was pretty good - and her jewelry boxed attested to that. Our first go round revealed 26 pins, from the Washington, DC Women's Bowling Association, Virgina State Women's Bowling Association, Women's International Bowling Conference, and more. Welp, we found two more!

The one at the top of the page may be my new favorite out of all of them, b/c... Tasmanian Devil. I mean, really, y'all. This sends me back to my Looney Toons youth - Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs. But anyway...Both pins have been added to the collection, and I actually hope we find more. Plus we have tons of pictures of Grandma posing with her teammates at tournaments, so maybe we can match a few pictures to pins?

Speaking of which, one of the other things that came back up with us from DC were Grandma Doris' photo albums. If she had been born a little later, she would have been a scrapbooker, with all the fancy doodads, special papers, stickers and scissors that cut decorative edges. As it was, she filled album after album with labeled pictures, some with commentary, some with dialogue bubbles (yep!). There are 19 of them.

So one of my next genealogy tasks is going through these babies, scanning and cataloging the photos, and then making the hard (or digital) copies available to folks in the family who want them. Did I mention there are 19 albums? I need to get cracking!

Bowled Over by Bowling Pins

As some of you already know, my Grandma Doris passed away earlier this year. Technically, Doris Elizabeth (Reid) Shepherd was my step-grandmother – my mom’s stepmother – but she’s the only grandmother I’ve ever known on that side of my family. My biological grandma, Elnora Mae (Cooper) Shepherd, passed away when my mom was 5 years old. (In a strange twist of metaphysical fate, both grandmothers passed away on April 1^st, forty-eight years apart.)

One of the things Grandma Doris’ passing has meant is that a ton of her stuff is now at my parents’ house. Now that it’s yard sale season, we’re going through boxes and bags to see what can be let go, and what we want to keep (which, it turns out, is basically anything with sentimental value). Look what came out of one envelope of costume jewelry:

 

Grandma Doris was a bowler. Actually, that fails as a descriptive statement. Grandma Doris had a deep, abiding and passionate love of bowling and she gave a lot of her time and energy to both playing the sport and supporting it. Among her many bowling commitments, she was a member (and sometimes officer) of the Washington, DC Area Women’s Bowling Association for many years.

A love of bowling was something that my grandma had in common with her husband, my Granddad Louis, and my mom and aunt remember family trips to places like Lebanon, PA and Aliquippa, PA so their parents could compete in bowling tournaments. I didn’t find any Lebanon pins, but I did find a few from the Virginia State Women’s Bowling Association and the Ocean County, New Jersey Women’s Bowling Association:

She also had more than a few from the Women’s International Bowling Congress, plus one from the National Duckpin Bowling Congress:

 

(I’m not gonna lie – I had to look up what “duckpin bowling” was. According to duckpins.com, it is “a variation of 10-pin bowling where the balls and pins are significantly smaller making the game much harder.”)

In total, I counted 26 pins in that one envelope. I wonder if there are more hiding somewhere else? Either way, maybe we’ll come up with a good way of displaying these – my dad has already suggested mounting them in a nice frame for a conversation piece.

This is just a sliver of my Grandma Doris’ bowling story – I’ll be coming back to this topic more than a few times, so stay tuned! In the meantime, do you have a story or memory about Doris Shepherd the Bowler?