One of my very favorite family heirlooms is the glass oil lamp my maternal grandmother gave me.  Her German-born mother had originally owned the lamp. The story passed on to me was that my great grandmother, Amelia Meyer, purchased the lamp from the Montgomery Ward Catalog in 1907. Not long afterwards, the family of five left their ranch in South Dakota for the milder climate of the Willamette River Valley in Oregon. The family evidently had enough of the hard, cruel winters of South Dakota. The lamp was hand carried on board the locomotive train as it headed west, to their new life.

As I hold this lamp in my hands, I can’t help but think back about the life this old oil lamp has lived.  And how it has been connected to my family for over one hundred years.

I imagine this lamp sitting on a primitive, hand cut, wooden table in that ranch house near Sturgis, South Dakota.  I imagine my ancestors sitting around its glowing light poring over maps of the ranch, eating simple but filling meals together, or using its light to carefully tend to a sick child in the middle of a cold winter’s night.

I’ve seen many oil lamps sitting on shelves in antique shops near my home.  I wonder who their owners were. But all I know is what that little white price tag tells me.  It’s cold, and empty, and leaves me wanting to know more.

Luckily, my family’s oil lamp sits on a wooden dresser in my bedroom. It connects me to those that came before me and contributed to the woman I am today.  My oil lamp may not create light anymore, but it serves as an everlasting beacon to the family history I cherish.

What family heirlooms have been entrusted into your care?

What stories were you told about them?

We’d love to hear from you!

Have you ever strolled through a dusty and cluttered antique shop and wondered who were the original owners of all the items on the shop’s shelves?  An oil lamp, a well-read family Bible, a handmade log cabin quilt, a smoke stained pipe standing upright in its hand carved wooden pipe rack – these are the sorts of eclectic things that you can find in any antique shop.

As a personal historian, I too have looked at and pondered over these items. I then look closely at the hand-written price tags, which often tell me little or nothing about where an object came from.

I try to imagine who once used the old glass oil lamp in days long gone by.  Maybe the first owner used that oil lamp to better see the tiny printed words of sacred Scriptures while their legs were snuggly covered by a hand made quilt.  Perhaps the reader sat in a one-room, sparsely furnished cabin in the Shenandoah Valley or in a Victorian mansion in northwest Washington DC. It’s hard not to wonder what was going on in the world when these particular items were being used.  My imagination runs wild with curiosity.

Each of these old pieces indeed belonged to a person or a family. The item may have been passed down by a generation or two and somehow this cherished heirloom became separated from its story.

So how does this apply to you? Well, we all have a story to tell, to preserve and to share with the next generation.  Many of us have been fortunate enough to have family heirlooms, which once belonged to our grandparents or maybe even great grandparents.  If we do not write down the details of our heirloom, this information will be lost in time and maybe our treasured heirloom will even end up on a dusty, glass shelf of an antique shop!

Consider the value of identifying your family heirlooms.  This is a gift of connectedness that keeps on giving – generation after generation.

So take a few minutes of your day, dust off that lamp, and start the identification process today.

In my next post, I’ll be showing some of my own heirlooms, and how I’ve recorded their stories. Stay tuned! In the meantime, leave a comment below with stories about your family’s heirlooms.  What items do you cherish, and why?