Keys To Our Past, Part 2

All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.
                                                                           ~Unknown

This project took months and months, but that was because we were at the cottage more than we were home.  Normally, I would say a few weeks or a bit more.  One of the toughest decisions is deciding which photos to use, out of the thousands we had laying around in tubs and more tubs.

The photo above is our family crest that we purchased while at Disney World a few years ago.  It was in the United Kingdom Exhibit in Epcot and we had them go ahead and frame it.  So this was a must have for our photo wall.

I was going to put Wall Words on this wall until I found this great frame from Target.  

I had quite a collection of frames that I had from over the years, but I had to buy a lot of new ones, too.  Most, but not all, came from Michael's when they had their sale or coupons.  The photo above is of my mother's grandparents, or my great-grandparents from Hungary.  Actually, these are copies of the original photos that were in the large oval frames I had.  My mother gave me the frames years ago, but she insisted on keeping the photos.  OK, no problem, right?  Until on one of my visits I found a box of old photos, with heavy items on top, and these large, original photos cracking in pieces below.  Oops!  After my mother passed away, I took the cracked photos to a good photographer and just had them scan it the best they could.  I wasn't going to pay to have them repaired.  

My father was the "baby" of his family and that's him sitting between his parents.  No one in his family was very tall, but somewhere in the family genes, my father received his height.  He towered over his mother and father, and that's where my sister and I got our height.  Thank you dad!

This is the original photo and frame that my father had from 1943 when he was in the army.  He's in the middle of the second row behind the officers.

My mother in the middle, with her sisters and sisters-in-law.

Mr. Cottage's father on the far left end with all of his brothers.  They all lost their parents when they were killed in a car/train crash when Mr. Cottage's father was only 7 years old.  A very sad story.

And the photos above are my mother-in-law's parents.  Her father was a veterinarian and during WWI he took care of all the horses in his unit.

Isn't it amazing what we can learn about our past.  All of our kids had to write a family history project when they were in grade school.  Through that project, we obtained more information than any of us could imagine.

On Monday, I'll post the third and final part of this series.  It will tell you more about how I created this wall and how you can do the same with your photos.