Saturday, November 10, 2018

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What Did You Collect As a Youth?

Hey genea-folks, 
it's Saturday Night again, 

 time for more Genealogy Fun!


Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music!), is to:


1)   Most of us collect dead ancestors and relatives now - what did you collect when you were a child or teenager?

2)  Tell us about your collections in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment with a link to your post.

Here's mine:

I had several collections between the ages of 6 and 18, including:

*  Baseball cards:  In the early 1950s, I rode my bike all over North Park and East San Diego trying to find stores with baseball cards (5 to a pack, with a slab of pink gum, for 10 cents (?)).  Then I would trade duplicates with my brother, my friends, etc.  In 1954, I had a complete collection of all the cards published by Topps.  Eventually, I invented a dice game to play my own fantasy baseball games - my team usually won somehow.

*  Bottle caps:  I had a collection, usually gleaned from my family, neighbors, and friends who saved them for me.  I also went to grocery stores and asked for them.

*  Maps:  My father's cousin Dorothy subscribed to National Geographic, and I asked for maps from the magazine when they were finished with them.  I also obtained city maps from gas stations and studied them.  This led to making my own fantasy maps with rivers, streams, hills, railroads, bridges, highways, stop lights, etc.  In color.  I really wanted to be a city planner.

*  Stamps:  My grandfather, Lyle Carringer, gave my brother and me a treasure trove of cancelled stamps when we were 8 or 10 years old.  We received stamp albums and pasted them in, both U.S. and foreign stamps.  Then we started getting uncancelled stamps from my grandfather's weekly trips to the post office, and eventually plate blocks.  He had a worldwide correspondence with stamp collectors.  This became my sick-day or rainy-day activity.  We ended up buying uncancelled stamps to add to our collections at a downtown stamp shop.

*  Coins:  My brother and I collected coins also - each denomination (up to quarters), each year, each mint, etc.  We had coin books for each denomination/year/mint.  My folks and grandparents saved coins for us to catalog.

*  Bus schedules:  We lived right on the #2 bus line in San Diego, and I collected the schedules for as many lines as possible.  I loved the maps.  From my front window, I noted when a scheduled bus was late, noting the bus number to try to figure out the schedule.  Another sick/rainy day activity.

Collecting things was a big deal for me - it stimulated my curiosity and creativity, gave me goals to achieve, and I learned about geography, money, baseball, maps, etc.  

In my late teens and early 20s, I collected radio station music surveys (Top 40 lists) from all over the country.  From age 20 to 45, I listened for distant U.S. and foreign radio stations, kept a log, made tape recordings, and learned about radio wave propagation.  This was usually an evening and early morning (like 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. activity).  I also collected QSL cards and verification letters from the stations.  


Then I started on genealogy in 1988 and have collected thousands of dead ancestors and relatives.  


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Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

My collection hasn't changed since we wrote about this in 2016, though I have collected more dead ancestors! https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2016/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-did.html

Janice M. Sellers said...

Here's my list:

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2016/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-did.html

Linda Stufflebean said...

Here's my post: https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2018/11/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-58/

Nancy Ward Remling said...

Over a month late, but I finally finished writing this post!

https://remlinggenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/12/i-finally-finished-writing-this.html