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.