Alphabe Thursday..."P" as in Penmanship

It's time again for Alphabe-Thursday sponsored my Ms. Jenny at Jenny Matlock..."off on my tangent." Today's assignment is the letter "P" as in PENMANSHIP.

Is PENMANSHIP becoming a lost art? So many things are going by the wayside with computers. Even the post office is in trouble because mail volume is going down due to E-mail. How often to we drop someone a handwritten note?

I was reading about vintage autograph books that Cheryl over at My Sister's Cottage had and it prompted me to go looking for my grandmother's autograph book. Back in the 1980's I became interested in genealogy and worked on it for quite a while. My mother would find pictures and other memorabilia that she thought might help me in my quest to learn more and I guess I somehow became the official family historian. One of the things she sent me was my grandmother's autograph book. I've recently become interested in genealogy again and I'm slowly but surely entering all that 1980's information into Family Tree Maker and hope to eventually jump onto Ancestry.com to try and learn more. All of my research was done before I had Internet access. Meanwhile, I'm also digging out my mother's old notes and the little treasures she sent me.

You can click on the pictures below to enlarge them...

Here's my grandmother's old autograph book and some examples of PENMANSHIP. Sadly, as I was scanning some of the pages the cover fell off. I'm afraid that was inevitable considering the years. The first autographs were written in 1905. I have no idea what the April dates on the left hand page mean. I think Willie Volz might have been her cousin. Perhaps those are the dates her cousin and Uncle John died? Maybe I'll discover something when I dig into the family roots again. I think the book might have been a gift from her Momma?

Here's another page from June 15, 1905.

And the page on the right is from my autograph book and written by my sister in 1954. Obviously, that poem had already been around for a long time. Do children still have autograph books today? If so, they might be still writing this poem.

I found this page from my grandmother's book interesting. In the poem she talks about dipping her pen in the ink. I'm afraid that's something that's long in the past now.

And this was written by my grandmother's cousin. I did know that one of her father's sisters was married to a man named Grode and this must have been their daughter.

I was also surprised by some of the artwork people took the time to include with their autographs. (In the first picture that's a real four leaf clover that my grandmother had between the pages of her book.)

I also came across a newspaper clipping my mother had sent me. It was from my grandparents wedding on January 1, 1919. (You'll have to click on the article in order to enlarge and read it.) The article talks about the PRETTY wedding.




And here's their PRETTY wedding.




I think I'm going to take a vacation from posting on Blogger for a couple of weeks. I'm having trouble putting pictures in posts since Blogger made the changes to Blogger In Draft and I went back to the previous version. For some reason my pictures will no longer appear in the post where I put the cursor. When I upload them they appear at the very top of the post and then I try and drag them or I have to go into the html version and copy and paste where I want them to go. It's also messing up the spacing and although I fix it I find that when I publish it's still sometimes wacky. It's taking way too much time to put up a simple post with pictures, so I'm taking a break in hopes that things will magically improve while I'm gone. I had intended to show more pages from my old autograph book, but decided to save it for another time when things might be working better.

Now head over to Ms. Jenny's blog and visit some more Alphabe-Thursday posts!