Ancestor Wall

Growing up, we had this wall of old photos right inside the front door of our home.  There were photos of our parents as little children, photos of grandparents, great grandparents and even a couple great-great grandparents.  There was a portrait of my great-grandfather who looked remarkably like my dad.  Everyone said the sister of my great-grandmother looked a lot like me.  We could see a bit of each of us in so many of those faces on the wall.

As a little girl, I remember loving that wall. I liked the old-fashioned clothing and remember my mom marveling at the work the mothers must have done to have all those children dressed in crisp white shirts and dresses with no washing machines or modern irons involved. My parents often told us stories about our ancestors and about themselves in their youth which made the pictures all the more interesting.  And I liked thinking of all those ancestors watching over us as we went in and out the front door every day.

I always planned to have an ancestor wall in my home when I had my own family.  But even though my mom was kind enough to give each of us a whole sheaf of copies of old photos for Christmas a few years ago, my ancestor wall didn't happen.  Until last month.  

The entryway of this beautiful old house was just begging for photos of our ancestors so I did it.  I looked through the photos from my mom, picked out my favorite ones, took a quick trip to the store, found some fairly inexpensive frames that would work, came home, stuck photos in the frames, hung them up on the wall in the entryway and voila!  I've got my ancestor wall.  And it only took a couple hours once I just decided to do it and stopped waiting for the time when I'd get around to making enlargements or better reproductions of certain photos or finding the very perfect frames or getting copies of all the Loosli family pictures so I could put up both sides of the family at once.  It's amazing how easy projects can be when I give up on doing them perfectly and decide to just get them done!

   

I've loved telling my kids the stories of these ancestors and I like thinking of them watching us in our comings and goings.  I'm excited to get photos of Jared's side of the family so I can really finish this project - I've got a wall saved for the Looslis.  It'll happen.

I also put up this collage of cool letters that Eliza and I found when we visited Boston last fall and that I framed as a Christmas present for Jared.  Liza and I had so much fun making it and I love how it combines architectural elements from some of the places Jared and I loved in Boston - the place where we met and where we began our family - with our family name.  There's a clearer photo of the letters if you scroll on down.