The Chest that Started it All
This old sea chest is what started it all: my fascination with genealogy, my desire to learn everything I possibly could about the people that were in that box. I had seen it many times before in the attic of my grandparents' old farmhouse in Winchester, Virginia. When I was young, it didn't hold much interest for me - there weren't any obvious photographs or anything - just a bunch of papers. When I went to Loveland, Colorado in the summer of 2018 to visit my parents and my grandfather, I came across it again. Only this time, I was entranced. I started to read some of the letters - they were mushy love letters written in the 1800s and I was hooked. When asked, my grandfather (who probably got this chest from his Aunt Royall Holt Tyler, though I'll never know now) was thrilled that I'd taken an interest in the family history and told me I could take it home with me. And so I did and I've been reading and transcribing the contents within ever since....