Family

Riding the Wave

Pop, my paternal grandfather, surfing in Hawaii, sometime in 1911. I have no idea if this is good surfing form. Probably not.

Before the world went mad in 1914, my grandfather as a young man, with change in his pocket, did some adventurous traveling. I’ve always loved this photo, because it’s the only one of him that indicates that he may have had a sense of fun and a less-than-serious side to him. We never knew him this way. He was always the staunch general to us.

I’ve let April slip by without feeding this blog because of reasons I don’t want to get into. I am now back on track.

Family

My Family’s Heroes

Brigadier General Frank F. Bell II, USAR, 1948 (my paternal grandfather, Pop)
Brigadier General Frank F. Bell II, USAR, 1948 (my paternal grandfather, Pop)

It’s Veterans Day, so instead of a shallow topic like upholstery, I’m honoring the men in my family who have enabled me to freely be who I am. Men who have left me an honorable legacy. Fortunately my grandfather Pop, who’s in the above picture, left us a wealth of information about our family history. And then my father in his final years hired a genealogist to bring the family history up to date. It’s now up to me, to continue the research and to then create and print the family history in a hardbound book. After spending the first four months of this year clearing out the old family home and bringing all the important papers and photos here to my house, I reached a saturation point. Eventually I will be editing, scanning, and filing all of the millions of photos, but only after I have had time to recover from the burnout.

FYI: If the copy reads stiff and tedious, it’s because I copied from various word files that the genealogist had created. The time involved pulling this post together was way more than I expected. Trunks and boxes were searched for missing photographs, then there was the scanning, then there was the composing, so if I were to have this up before Veterans Day came to an end, I had to forego perfection. Besides none of this generates any revenue.

We’ll start with my paternal grandfather.