Do you know your family? Do you know who they really are? What inspires them and brings them joy?
I’m not talking about your mother or your father. I’m not even talking about your cousins or your grandparents.
What do you know about your family who have since passed on from this life? Your great-grandfather, or your great-great-aunt?

 

 

If you had asked me this very question a month ago, my answer would have been a simple “nothing, really”. In fact, the only thing I could boast in my vault of family history knowledge were the names of my great-grandparents, and that’s about it. However, when I was home over the Christmas break, my mom rediscovered a bag she had had for many years that finally introduced me to my mother’s family for the first time.

 

 

For many years my mom had kept my grandfather’s “flight bag” (the suitcase he had taken on his flights while working as a Captain for United Airlines) tucked carefully away on a shelf in our home. However several years ago, most likely between moving from one international assignment to another, my grandfather’s suitcase was misplaced, and went missing for several years. This bag wasn’t just any vintage suitcase, though. While the suitcase had lived its own exciting history following my grandfather all over the world, what made this bag truly special was that inside it my mom kept hundreds of photos of my grandfather’s family. My grandfather’s mother and father, great aunts, and great-grandparents.

 

 

Amongst all those photographs and old newspaper clippings was one solitary black photo album, worn from its many years of life, containing a collection of photos taken by my great-grandmother Norma Jean Reynolds. Until one short month ago, I had always believed my creative talent came only from my grandmother’s side of the family, not my grandfather’s. My grandmother Leilani was the one who taught me from a young age how to draw and paint, to see the world in vibrant hues and abstract brush strokes. My mom was the one who taught me how money was never a limiting factor when it came to creating a home filled with beauty and love. But I learned something about my grandfather’s mother Norma that I had never guessed while looking through that worn black photo album. My love for photography came from another amazing woman in my family, this time from my grandfather’s side. It came from, at least in some small part, from my Great-Grandmother Norma.

 

 

While the photos in the suitcase of my great aunts and uncles, my great grandparents, and the rest of my family who lived so long ago were interesting and fun to look through, my great-grandmother’s photo album was different. Inside it she had carefully curated images from her travels across the United States, from Washington state down to New Mexico. Illinois to California. It seems like perhaps my love of travel didn’t just start with my grandpa’s career flying Boeing B727s, but perhaps extended a little farther. I guess it’s no wonder, then, that with a mother who seemed to find such beauty in foreign places, my grandpa felt such an urge to be a pilot, to travel and see new lands.

 

 

However my favorite part of this worn black photo album, was not just the breadth of locations contained in all the photographs. Rather, there was an artistry to the photos contained within these pages that I didn’t know was possible back in the early days of photography. Cold alpine rivers perfectly framed by snow-laden evergreens and sunsets reflecting off the glistening harbor waters between gently bobbing sailboats anchored for the night. I could have stared for hours at each and every one of my great-grandmother’s memories.

 

 

I suppose, then, that I’m not the only person in my family who has viewed photography as not just a way to document, but also as an artform. This discovery has helped me to find a connection with my great-grandmother Norma that I didn’t know existed. Looking through all of her photos, falling in love with each and every individual image as I delicately turned each page, I suddenly realized that perhaps there was something Great-Grandma Norma and I both had a love for and that felt pretty wonderful.