Category: 52 Weeks

Week 3: Cars

Posted on by Kathleen

It’s time for another 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History post! This week the topic is cars.

Week 3: Cars. What was your first car? Describe the make, model, and color, but also any memories you have of the vehicle. You can also expand on this topic and describe the car(s) your parents drove and any childhood memories attached to it.

I don’t have a drivers license so I don’t have any first car memories yet. I’ll just stick with cars from my childhood. There are two that I remember well, but my family had a lot of cars before that.

Our Station Wagon, May 1994.

The first car of my memory is this old station wagon. Boy did we have this a long time. Don’t ask me why we put a shirt on our dog. It was the 90’s, we did those things for fun. If you look closely, near the back bumper was our other dog, PIB. His original name was Red, but mom eventually just started calling him P.I.B. (Pain in Butt) because he followed me around and was always underfoot. Gosh I miss my Pibbers.

My mom says she finally got a station wagon so the kids would stop complaining, “SHE’S TOUCHING ME!!!! MOOOOOM!! HE HIT ME!” A lot of my younger memories are of this car. Mom used to drive me out to the school bus stop at our old house, the one that we lost to a fire. The driveway was very long and I remember the rides, listening to 98.3 Star FM, our local radio station. You don’t know it but I just sung the jingle. It’s one of those things, I can’t say it without singing the age old jingle. This is the car of my childhood. In fact, I have a lot of memories in the very back of this car. It had two fold up seats in the back. I used to sit back there and play with toys on trips to Ohio. One trip was very memorable. My favorite toy growing up were the Fisher Price Little People. I had more Little People then I did Barbies. I used to set them up in the back of the car and have little towns, including a school bus route.

Nissan Stanza, 1986 model, picture courtesy of Wikimedia.

This is the car of my teenage years. This is the car I remember through middle and high school. I have a lot of pictures of me and my best friend playing around in this one (yet I can find none at hand). Ours was a blue color. We nicknamed it Bessie. I have a habit of naming our cars. It’s a problem, I know but it’s just the way I am. The Nissan was with us for a lot of life moments. It went with me and my friend to all our concerts. I’ll never forget getting lost going to concerts in DC and Virginia in this thing. Oh it was fun. We had this car for a long time, because we replaced the engine at least once. I have memories of sitting in the back of this car on the way to Ohio. Me and my friend would make faces at other drivers on the beltway.

This post is part of a weekly series, 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History, by Amy Coffin. It is being hosted and promoted by GeneaBloggers.

Week 2: Winter

Posted on by Kathleen

It’s time for another Personal History entry from me! This week’s topic is:

What was winter like where and when you grew up? Describe not only the climate, but how the season influenced your activities, food choices, etc.

Winter is never really the same around here. We’ve had periods of snowy winters and periods of no snow.

When we do have snow, boy do we have it! As long as I remember, when it snows like that I would go into work with my mother. It was one of my favorite activities. The picture above was taken in 1996 and she was working at a drug store. After that it was a 7-11 just outside of Washington, DC. I have a lot of pictures of this year. I think it’s the year where we went without power for 2 weeks! That’s a record for us still.

What do you think you’d do if you were a mother of three with the neighborhood kids and no power? My mother taught us how to make candles! We’ve always had a gas stove, it’s just what my mother prefers. So even though we didn’t have power, we had the stove. So she taught us how to make candles, we played board games, and I’m pretty sure we did a lot of shoveling. I even remember one year there were six of us shoveling for hours! We wanted to make sure that my dad could get back in the driveway. We shoveled and shoveled, and we still had quite a ways to go when he got home. He ended up just driving over it, but it was the thought that counts right?

During that snow storm, I remember the camping out in the living room. We all got out sleeping bags and flashlights. We stayed up late telling ghost stories. I was the youngest, so I was tortured of course. As for the food, I can’t really remember that. I’m sure we had a combination of soups and chili. I do love my mama’s chili!

My tastes haven’t changed much, these days there’s nothing better than curling up with a cup of hot chocolate and a bowl of mom’s chicken and noodles! For me there’s nothing more relaxing then snow falling and having a movie day. If you haven’t noticed movies are big in our family. We don’t change much during the winter, it’s just we do more indoors, together stuff.

We’re supposed to get some kind of winter weather today, and I plan on spending it with my genealogy database! I’ve been so busy organizing and doing other things I haven’t had a “genealogy day” in awhile. Hopefully this entry doesn’t sound scatterbrained. I do have an attention span problem when it comes to writing.

Note: This entry is part of a 52 week series called 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History.

Week 1: New Years Memories

Posted on by Kathleen

This year I’ll be participating in the weekly series, 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History. It’s a joint effort between GeneaBloggers and Amy Coffin at the We Tree blog. Every week there will be a new topic for me to write about my own past and family history.

Week 1: Did your family have any New Year’s traditions? How was the New Year celebrated during your childhood? Have you kept these traditions in the present day?!

For as long as I can remember, we’ve always done movie marathons on New Years Eve. In fact, that’s our family activity. When we were little, Dad would take us to the video store and we’d have to agree on one movie and then he’d get a “grownup” movie. It would be all of us, and then as we got older it was just me and my sister. We would actually stay up and watch whatever marathon was on TV whether it be a Corey Haim/Corey Feldman marathon on TNT or it was the top 100 music videos on MTV. We weren’t real formal about it.

This tradition has evolved from a marathon night to a family movie night. Now we usually just watch one movie (this year Inception), and we make snacks and drink sparkling cider. I know it’s tame but it’s our little tradition and I can’t see us ending it anytime soon! One day I’m definitely going to instill this tradition in my own family. My best memories growing up are the family movie nights. Whether it be New Years, Halloween, Christmas, and of course birthdays!

The above image is a free clipart image from the Microsoft Office website. I do not own it and am not using it to make money. I am just incapable of having an image free entry.