Sallie has Friends...Lots and Lots of Friends

So, I've learned a lot about my great-grandmother Sallie by reading the diary she kept for a handful of years during the Civil War:

Turns out, her diary is only a tiny bit of a huge amount of genealogical information my family has compiled over the years. This week I went up to Santa Barbara, where my parents lived before they died, and this is what my sister and I uncovered:

That's 75 pounds of family records in the back of my car. (I know; I stood on my scale and added up the weight of all the boxes.) There are birth records, love letters, photos, bills of sale, marriage certificates, grade-school reports. You name it; we kept it!:

Some of it is pretty well organized, because my grandmother and her brother were amateur genealogists, back in the day:

They probably could have told me in a second who this handsome gentleman is, and how he's related to them, and where he lived, and who his wife and kids were:

And the same for this sweet-faced lady. I'm going to spend the next several months trying to learn all I can about these people, and a whole lot more.

There are letters my father wrote his mother during World War II. There are letters my great-great-grandfather wrote my great-great-uncle back in the 1840s: 

And then there's this. I have never seen this before. It's a scrap of paper, in my father's handwriting, taped to the outside of one of the boxes filled with photo albums and papers from our ancestors. It's like a tiny little message to me, from The Great Beyond. The last line says, "For attention of Juli Kinrich."

It's like he knew some day I'd want to find out way more about Sallie and her huge family tree. Because they're his family. Mine, too.

Thank you, Daddy.

I think.