National Grandparents' Day

This floating holiday -- the first Sunday after Labor Day -- was begun in 1978 to honor grandparents, as I learned from my research about it, but doesn't seem to be widely observed. Perhaps that varies from region to region, state to state, family to family, but in any case, I was inspired by Memories4Me's interesting journal entry today to note it here.

I knew only one of my grandparents, as both of my father's parents, as well as my mother's father, died before I was born. "Memie," as we called my mother's mother, shown here in 1920 with my mother, had four children who lived past infancy and fourteen grandchildren. My mother was her third child and only daughter.

Memie's maternal grandmother died two years before she was born, and her paternal grandmother died when Memie was not quite three years old. Her own mother died in 1938, when Memie's children were in their late teens or early twenties, and in one case, married, so she did have her own mother's "grandmother years" as a model.

I remember Memie with gratitude and love, and featured my grandmother with her camera early on in my journal. Back then, grandparents didn't talk with their grandchildren about their own interests, at least in my extended family, but I like to think that she passed her interest in family photos on to me.

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