Far from Home

On the cover of my grandfather's WWII scrap book, he had written the names of many places he'd been. I thought it would be interesting to map out the locations and get a real picture of where his Navy service had taken him. He was a teenage Iowa farm boy when he enlisted and hadn't travelled very far. For the remainder of his life after the Navy, he would spend very little time away from home. To the extent that he generally exited holiday dinners at my parents' house while the dessert dishes were being cleared from the table, and he skipped his own 80th birthday party. It's therefore wild for me to see all the places he had been that would have seemed extremely exotic to him.

Even when you know your family story, geography is an important component--both in documenting it and in adding dimension to it. Not long ago my mother learned that her parents lived in another city for a few months in the 1940s, before she was born. She hadn't known that, and it was fun to see her learn something new about her own parents.