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Collected Item: “Family Inheritance”

Give your story a title.

Family Inheritance

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Photograph, text story

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

My grandmother passed in July 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic began in the United States. She left behind a lot of miscellaneous things, including a number of family heirlooms that I have inherited. When we were packing up her trailer and storage containers, we had totes upon totes filled with family documents, awards, newspaper clippings, objects, and photographs. I feel as if I have my own personal archive of our family within these totes. I can't help being emotional about these things I now possess and grateful that my grandmother was a family-history hoarder. I can carry her memory on by taking care of them.

One of the various objects was this letter/certificate in a frame, giving thanks and recognition to my great-grandfather for his military service after he had passed. I don’t know much about the paper itself, it seems pretty common and not a unique letter, but it was something nice and surprising to find within the boxes.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

family history, history, death, grief, healing,

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Jen Rodriguez

Give this story a date.

2020-10
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