I have my grandmother's walnut rocking chair.

My grandparents had 10 children, times were hard, & she was pregnant.

Papa bought her a rocking chair to rock the new baby.

(Isn't that what you do when times are hard & your wife is pregnant? buy furniture???)

The baby turned out to be my father.

When my mother was pregnant with me, Granny "loaned" her the rocking chair, & when my mother moved to assisted living, I brought it home with me.
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I wish I had my uncle's poems.

He was in the army in England during WWII, & my grandparents received a telegram;
he was missing, presumed dead.

A year later, the army found him in an English hospital, not making sense, talking about his English wife & little daughter who had been killed in a bombing raid.

They sent him home & discharged him from the army & denied him veterans' benefits, saying that he was unfit for army life or some such.

He never spoke of his time in England again.

He lived with his parents for the rest of his life, working odd jobs & construction & writing poetry.

He was very nice to us children, patient & entertaining.

He would sit for hours on the sofa with us, looking at postcards he had sent our grandparents & postcards his army buddies had sent him.

When I was a little girl, I read some of the poems in his notebook, & they were melancholy, sad things about loss & honor, too deep for a little girl to comprehend.

Nobody knows where that notebook went.

Being a gardener I wish I had my Grandfathers hoe. It was worn off into the shape of a rounded off crescent. The handle was homemade. I was back in my hometown in 2003. Of course Grandpa and Grandma were long gone to heaven and the house had been sold. I drove by in the hope that his storage shed was still there and I had the nerve to walk up and ask if I could search that shed. Of course the shed was long gone, so ended the search. But at the age of 78 I still remember. Steve in Baltimore County.

Rocking chairs ... sigh. When Mama was pregnant with my oldest sister, Daddy bought an old oak rocking chair (used) and she rocked all of us kids in it. Years later when they were divorced, Daddy took the chair and had it refinished. When he passed, his second wife kept it. I would love Mama's rocking chair.

I do have two oil paintings Mama did when she was a young woman, one of the Lake Erie shoreline and another of the old Notre Dame Academy in Cleveland, Ohio down the street from where she grew up.

My paternal grandparents died before I was born. My maternal grandfather died a month before I turned 5, I remember being at the house the night he died and the Priest praying ... Grandma never forgave him for "leaving her" and became a recluse until she died when I was 16. All I have of them are a few pictures.

I have a small 6" wood handle fork that was my Grandmothers, worn down on one side from all the use it had due to cast iron pans, wish I had hers frying pans.

From my Grandfather I have a pewter shaving mirror, My brother got his straight edge razor and a small pen knife, which I remember him using to trim pencils.

Sue

My father's parents died when he was very young and all I have is a photo of my grandmother and her brother as young adults.

I have my maternal grandmother's cameo, which I wore on my wedding day. She was beautiful, with the loveliest smile. She was a true southern lady and always had a beautiful dressing table in her bedroom, covered with crystal perfume bottles. I also have her Bible with her notations in the margins. I love to look at her handwriting because it makes me feel that she is nearby.

The house in the movie "Christmas Story"......not so much the exterior but the interior was my grandmother's house. The kitchen was almost an exact replica. But I guess everyone had those sinks at that time. Instead of the cabinet under the sink as in the movie my grandmother had little curtains that hid the stuff underneath. After her and grandpa divorced she took in boarders to make ends meet. Does anybody have boarders anymore?

I think modern zoning laws (along with home Owners Associations) have pretty much eliminated people taking in boarders, Suzanne.

I'd love to know what happened to some of the things that were in my Aunt Isabel's house in Bloomington, Illinois. She had a wonderful, well I guess you'd call it a hall chair, in the entryway to her house. It had a tall back over 6' tall with hooks on either side of a beveled mirror that was attached to the center & the seat of the chair lifted up for storage. That's where the galoshes were stowed. No one seems to know where it went, although since the house was sold in the early 1960's, I'm thinking it may have just been dumped at Goodwill or some similar place & considered "old junk" by my much-older cousins.

I did make off with my Grandmother's, my Aunt Frances' & my mother's cookbooks - Each of them one of those three-ringed Better Home & Gardens kind, although they all have different publication dates. I love to leaf through them looking at hand-written notes, flour & vanilla-stained pagess, and looking at the faded recipes cut out of newspapers, magazines & food packages. The memories of meals, birthday parties & holiday entertaining come rushing back with the turning of every page.

My grandparents were mostly born not only in the US, but in Chicago before the turn of the century, unusual for our tribe. Before the Depression, my grandfather was very wealthy, and his young bride had a number of "Depression glass" pieces. They lost every penny in the Crash, and my mother grew up bewtween that and WW2 rationing. When grandma died, I asked for the glass candy dishes and crocks in ruby red and green, plus her 1920 Deco dishes. I have carried those keepsakes with me for the past 20 years, over international water, moving to new countries, new houses, you name it.
I also have my paternal grandmother's soup pot, which I still use all the time; it must be at least 60-70 years old.
But the most missed thing for me are the stories of my great uncle, grandma's brother. As a young Jewish boy in the 1920's, the story goes that 6 months before completing dental school, he upped and left to be a hobo and ride the rails. The family was so ashamed that they never allowed him to tell the stories, especially to us kids growing up in the 60's. He died never having told any of the family of his travels. My sisters and I always felt that this was a huge loss.

Oscarthecat - what town did your grandparents live in when they died?

Any chance it was in Illinois?

I ask because I have just such a hoe, an irregular half moon, with a home-made handle. Short handle, perhaps 48" high, but perhaps less.....My dad was a great auction person, attended every one he could find, but I thought I had understood that particular hoe was from my grandfather, and I named it for him.

I had to grab my grandmother's bible and leaf through it. Kings II:9 she has notated: "Aunt Lillie's prayer".

Aunt Lillie was a southern Nazarene preacher who could bring forth fire and brimstone at the drop of a hat.

"I pray thee, let a double portion of they spirit be upon me."

Shilty, I was speaking of my maternal grandfather who is buried in Chewelah Washington. But my paternal great grandfather and many members of his family are buried around Rantoul, ILLINOIS. How is that for coincidence? Steve in Baltimore County.

I loved reading the stories here. I thought about it for a bit, but I can't think of a single physical object I care much about. It's the tiny things that occasionally bring up a treasured memory that is all I want or need. With the memories I have everything.

Some of the most powerful tiny things that leaveswave mentioned are fragrances.

coffee brewing & bacon frying (Sunay mornings)

tea brewing the old-fashioned way:
boil the water & put loose tea in a metal tea ball & steep (summer afternoons)

Pond's cold cream
(several aunts, we spent the nights with them often!)

fresh beans cooking (grandmother's kitchen)

Old Spice (uncle)

Aqua Velva (father)

cedar (mother's cedar chest)

wood smoke & hot steel & sawdust
(pot-bellied stove & power tools in grandfather's woodworking shop)

I have a little journal/ledger book of my great-grandma's. She died when I was 6. Her husband died when she was 36 after burying still-born twin daughters. She had 8 kids left at home to raise. Never remarried, she always loved her "Will". She kept his sawmill business running after his death in order to feed her family. She was always the business manager as Will couldn't read or write, his mean dad hadn't allowed him to go to school. But he was a genius at figuring out the intricate math required to saw logs into lumber. Her journal kept close notes on who owed what for how much lumber. The boys used to catch fish to sell and the ledger kept track of that. The girls would gather eggs, make butter, take in laundry, pick berries. It was all noted in the ledger as was a couple of her recipes. Living in the deep woods days from town was a struggle at best.

My Mom and Dad always blamed the Army for "losing" heirlooms as they moved our belongings often during WWII. Picture frames they didn't care about but the missing photos were irreplaceable.

We have more of DH's family things than my own, going back 5 generations. I must admit to selling some silver and furniture, though. Photographs and letters mean more to us and a few handsewn or handcrafted pieces. Whenever I read a post here about quilts, etc. I think "those are the real treasures".

Often it's the intangibles like love of music or gardening, carpentry or sewing which have an impact on and leave the strongest memories on future generations. It's nice to have Grandpa's handtools as DH does, but just the memory of his workshop would suffice. Same with my Mom's castiron cookware...too heavy for me but I enjoy making her recipes in my Cuisinaire. LOL josh

I don't have any physical object that belonged to any of my grandparents on either side of my family. But I do have memories of my mother's mother telling me "If the Germans had you, you'd say "Ma'am!" or that I had "champagne ideas and beer prices". I don't think I was really that bad of a kid, but she evidently wasn't a person who adored their grandchildren--not me, anyway. I know she was a strong individual, 'cause the story is told that she made "beer in the bathtub" during Prohibition!

P.S. The quote about "Germans" was made during WW2; she had also lived thru WW1. I sincerely hope I haven't offended anyone!

My father saw some really serious combat in WWII and was missing in action for several weeks behind enemy lines when a small detachment of volunteers stayed behind to blow up a bridge. Needless to say their rations were pretty pathetic in the combat zones to begin with, and non-existent when they were removed from their company.

He "raided" a chicken house at a German farm and found about a dozen of eggs. Just as he was about to exit, in walks the woman of the house and comes upon him. He said she looked at the eggs nestled in his helmet, and then just burst into tears. He knew the scarcity of food for her family was likely as severe as for his little group, but they were also desperate. He lay six of the eggs back in the boxes for them and left.

I guess what I am saying is that a lot of very good and innocent people didn't have a lot of choice about the circumstances under which they lived in war-time, nor choice about who controlled their lives. I suspect most of the generations of people who remember this episode or were affected by it "understand" the context of those words. At least I hope so.