© 2006 - Bruce Humphrey - all rights reserved


My mom passed to my wife a big collection of family buttons and Rosalie has preserved it and added some.
She displays them in a big ol' quart canning jar, making a rustic, pretty, and interesting presence on a side table in the dining room.

My mom got some of them from both my grandmothers
and it's anyone's guess how many previous generations contributed to the grandmothers' collections.

I suspect these collections and the additions thereto were not intended as family keepsakes
but rather as material for repair and rebuild.
Thus, they are also mementos of days when a button saved would be a button earned, or something like that.

What could be more personally and ancestrally significant than buttons worn in ages past by ancestors?
What could be more valuable to us and more worthless to anyone else?

But how neat it is to get lost in musings
over what certain buttons must have adorned which kind of garments worn by which particular ancestors
with this or that particular clothing preference or quirk.
Memories     Page one