Tell Your Story…..

Good evening, my friends! 

I thought I’d get here much earlier than this today, but you know how it goes…!

Before I start, I get to tell you that the winner of my blog anniversary giveaway (chosen by Random Number Generator) is…

                     NanaBeth!

So, if you could please send me an email with your address  at:

avingagechic2@yahoo.com

I’ll send your prize right out to you!  Congratulations, Beth!

 

Some people are just born with a story in their heart…such was the case with my great-grandmother, Anna.

Born in 1882 in a small, western town of Swiss immigrant parents, she watched, learned, and kept many, many stories close to her heart…

When a girl of only 16, she left with her father and other siblings for Canada.  Her mother had passed away a few years previously, and her father had been asked to go up to Alberta to help build the new canals and settle the area…

Oh, the stories she tells of that adventure!

She later met and married a handsome son of Swedish immigrants, Hjaldermar Ostlund…

…and they had five children, their first three were all daughters…

 

…just about my favorite photo of sisters that I’ve ever seen in my life…next to my three daughters…This was taken in 1911, just a year before my grandfather—their first son—was born.

Anna spent her widowed years writing…telling her mothers’ story, then her father’s, then her husband’s and her own…

…almost always on a typewriter using  the delightful old Olympia script that has become so dear to me…

I have folder upon folder of her papers in my collection (as does my mother), of her writings.  Some are the same story, typed all over again, very lovingly and painstakingly on that wonderful old, thin onionskin paper…sometimes with added details…no photocopying for Anna…all done page by page…

….telling the stories of those she loved that were no longer here to tell their own..

Even dearer and more beautiful to me are the few pages in her own handwriting…

Another page in my family album completed…Anna Tells Her Story…

Once, again I used a beautiful image from Crafty Secrets’ new “Vintage Photos” Creative Scraps, the fabulous old typewriter is from Crafty Secrets’ “Office 101” stamp set…

…my background is a bit of Anna’s typewritten story (scanned copy, of course!), on top of some beautiful Graphic 45 paper, some ribbon, lace, a VERY old metal vintage button, some typed sentiments—in the old Olympia font, of course!…and the usual sparkly stuff…

An amazing woman with an amazing story to tell…more stories for other days…

As I read and sort through her papers, I feel her urging me to write my own…but first, I tell of others that led me to my own story.

An incredible sunset last night—almost unreal in it’s color and intensity…

“Hurry outside!”, my daughter Sarah called to us, as she was out feeding the dogs…”it will be gone in a minute!”  

…and it was…we caught it just in time.

Tell your story.

Julie

p.s.  Please hurry over and visit the glorious Debi of “Life in My Studio” …she’s sharing some of her fabulous stash with a lucky winner!

 

LiveJournal Tags: Crafty Secrets,Vintage Photos,Anna Meier Brandley Ostlund,Hjaldermar Ostlund,life story,sunset