Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote, “Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.” If I can make a judgement from this comment alone, my parents, especially my father, left me a very substantial way to remember them. The tub in the photo only holds
As if a whirlwind wedding wasn’t enough, my parents also had a whirlwind honeymoon; four days to be exact. They spent those four days split between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, staying with family friends. In the February following their wedding my father began work as a junior accountant with the
For the most part it has been easy for me to find family documents. I am lucky to have inherited birth certificates, school reports, identification documents and death certificates, amongst others, for both sides of my family. Documents I haven’t inherited, I have found online. The difficult part is trying
Despite the common assumption that only children are spoilt, I cannot remember that being the case. I was definitely lucky though. As the only child of a Baltic German father and a Russian mother, I celebrated both birthday and name day, Christmas on 25th December and Orthodox Christmas on 7th
Six photograph albums and a tub full of loose photographs sit in the wardrobe of my spare room. Most of the photographs are from my maternal side of the family. There are so many of them, I am daunted by the thought of sorting through them. One of them is
Chrysanthemums are the traditional flower for Mother’s Day in Australia. They are also the birth flower for November, which was coincidentally my mother’s birth month. There appear to be many different meanings for chrysanthemums. Some say they symbolize optimism and joy, although some believe the yellow chrysanthemum is meant to