Sharing Memories: Time with Grandma

Lorine McGinnis Schulze from Olive Tree Genealogy Blog has this wonderful weekly Sharing Memories blog post.  I'm not sure why I don't catch them every week but you can find all 37 of them on her side bar of her blog.  I'm going to have to review the list and see if there are any more topics I can use. 


Since my blog has multiple purposes of sharing my learning experiences about doing genealogy and sharing the stories of my family so they are not forgotten, this is a perfect topic. 

I remember two trip for sure to my Grandparents home in Nantucket Island.  This were my Mom's (my second mother's) parents.  My Mom did adopt me, when I was 10, so they are my adopted grandparents.  They are the only grandparent I knew, since both the Hartmanns and the Chaplins all died before I was born. 

Nantucket Island October 1949

Here are some pictures from my first trip in October of 1949, my parents had been married about 4 to 5 months.  As you can see I like cats from an early age.  Notice the basket my Mom is holding for the clothespins, is that one of those expensive Nantucket Island Baskets??  Of course I have no recollection of this trip. 

Mary, Donald & George 1956, Nantucket Island

The trip in 1956 I do remember but not all of the details.  We drove from Long Island New York to Cape Cod, Massachusetts and took the ferry to Nantucket Island.  In our new 1956 Chevy. 

Alfred B. Corkish & Mildred E. Swann Corkish 1956

The things I remember about my grandma's house, was we sleep upstairs and there was no bathroom upstairs.  We had to use the chamber pots because kids were not allowed to go downstairs after they had been put to bed.  She had an ice box and the ice man came two times a week with a big block of ice.  I had swordfish cooked for dinner and loved it.  We could have Rice Crispies for breakfast and I don't know why I enjoyed them there so much better than at home but I can remember sitting and listening to the snap, crackle and pop.  Maybe just because it was vacation and we had more time.  I can remember being the only child who was allowed to play the piano because I did not pound it like my brothers.  I remember ship in a bottle on the mantel. 

This is my Nantucket friend Miriam we wrote each other well into high school and maybe even nursing school.  I loved the beach and still do, I'm just too far away from the beach to enjoy it often.  Grandma's house was about a block away from the beach.  We would swing on the swings in Miriam back yard.  We went to pick fresh blueberries and my brother George was bitten by a tick and my Mom had to get it off of him. 

My Nantucket friend Miriam Hull

My parents slept in the front bedroom upstairs which was my mother's bedroom when she was a girl.  The house use to have two families in it one on the second floor and one on the first floor.  I guess eventually my grandparents bought the whole house.  There was one bathroom down stairs.  There was a front parlor where the piano was and the fireplace with the ship in a bottle.  There was a big kitchen and a big dinning room.

Last trip to Nantucket Island August 1958

This picture is from the last visit in 1958, we flew there that year.  This was taken just before we left to fly back to New York.  Noticed how dressed up we were. 

Grandma Corkish was legally blinds and she could just she shadows one of my fondest memories of her are the pictures books she made for us kids.  Oh how I wish I had one of them now.  She took those marble covered composition books and cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them on to the pages of the note books.  Sometimes the pictures would be upside down, but we didn't care.  I would sit for hours looking at each book, I think there were three of them one for each kid.