Tuesdays Tip - Grads and Dads

    It was that time of year again. Graduations and Fathers Day all mixed together. My father had come down from North Bay where he retired to live with his wife Ivy. They came down for the week to attend my middle child (Miranda)'s Grade 8 Graduation ceremony. It was at the Fogular Furlan Club with a family dinner, then ceremony and then the kids stayed to have a dance afterward. It was a great evening for her. Her mother and her mothers mom & common-law husband where there. My Mother came and my Father with his wife, and my youngest Liam. The oldest Victoria couldn't make it as she was home studying for her exam the next morning. She  was Graduating High School the next Week. Grandpa and Grandma also came down to give her, her gift for graduating; however they couldn't stay for it, as they also had Grandma Ivy's grand daughter graduating the day after Victoria's Graduation, back up in North Bay. My Father had a stroke just over a year before, and while he was doing really good with the driving and recovery in general; it was a long drive for him. While he was here visiting with all of us, we went through some of the old photo's. I had photo's from when he was in school and newspaper clippings that my grandmother (his mother had kept). There were pictures of old freinds of his that he hasn't seen since the 1960's and so we didn't need to keep those and the clippings it turns out where friends of his mothers and nothing to do with our family. However it turned out that one picture was a freind of his that also stood in his original wedding to my mother and was paired in the wedding party with my mothers sister Florence. He was Walter W. and he and Florence it turns out became an item for a while. An item that produced my cousin Sherri. I hadn't known that. So I put together these photos and copied them to give to her. She is in contact with him having never known him until about the time she graduated High school I think.  I gave them to her this past summer when we where at our cousin Rob's wedding, as well as other pictures I had copied from distant cousins I re-met on Facebook. Her father was really happy to see the pictures too. It was his class picture and I had the names of most of the kids on the back of it. So three graduations in our family that month, a visit from my father (who I haven't seen since last fathers day) and finding my cousins father in my photo collection. It was quite the June. The Tip is, don't dismiss old photo's that you are sure are just old friends of the parents or grandparents. At least until you go through them with someone who knows the history of them first. In this case I would have thrown them out as not related or of consequence; when in fact this one was a branch that lead to my cousin. Checked and re-checked; saved!