Yesterday was a very busy day for me.  I started out helping my sister and mom clean out their garage.   During this cleaning, I came across more genealogical files that my mom had in a metal filing cabinet, but there were two treasures I found in that filing cabinet that outshined the files my mom had. 

Treasure #1 had me and my sisters screaming in excitement!  It has long been the story that after my parents divorced, that their wedding pictures were destroyed.  Over the years, we have found two wedding photos.  We were blown away when cleaning out the filing cabinet, I found not one, not two, but three more wedding photos of my parents.  One of them I know I definately have never seen in my life, it was of my parents with my materal grandparents.  The one thing that my sisters and I all commented on was the fact that my grandfather was smiling.  He hardly ever smiles.  Needless to say, we were very happy to have found treasure #1.  (I will post the pictures as soon as I get permission to do so.)

Treasure #2 was found shortly after I found the wedding pictures.  My grandmother loved flowers and plants.  Back in the day, my grandfather (a construction worker) built my grandmother her own little nursery where she planted and grew her flowers and plants.  In cleaning out the file cabinet, I found a plain plastic bag with a bunch of loose papers and bills.  At first glance it looked like old bills and trash, but when I looked at the loose paper closely, I found my grandmother’s equivilent to a gardening journal.  The earliest date I found was 1968 and she wrote in both english and spanish about what plants and flowers she bought and what was given to her as gifts.  She also noted her planting formulas for the optimum production for a plant or flower.  I remember as a child, my sister and I going to my grandmothers nursery and play with her “dirt”, shortly after being found out, my grandmother would get very mad at us and chase us out of the nursery.  Now, I know why she was always so mad (yes, we played with her “dirt” often!)  It turns out that we would ruin her “dirt” by messing up her formulas. 

Until I found her gardening  journal, I didn’t realize just how much of a hortaculturalist my grandmother was.  Weaved within her loose page gardening  journal were clippings of gardening articles and stories. She even noted an experiment she did with roses.   My grandmother, this woman who from the time I was 12 was always shorter than me, a woman who always spoke spanish, was a very knowledgeable hortaculturalist/scientist.  This was my grandmother’s hobby, much like genealogy is mine. 

My plan is to scan, possibly transcribe maybe even translate the spanish portions, and publish this journal to be ready to give to my family at our family reunion next August. 

I’m crossing my fingers I get it done on time.