Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Early Childhood Memories

It's Saturday Night -

Time For More Genealogy Fun!

Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to:

A)  What is one of your most vivid childhood memories? Was it family, friends, places, events, or just plain fun?  Your first memory?  Your most fun memory?

B)  Please share it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.

Here's mine:

I have started working on the story of my life and this is how I started it:

Early memories of our lives are hard to define. Do I really remember that event or are the photos in a photo album defining my memory? My earliest memories are from my fifth year.

I had scarlet fever while in kindergarten. Bits and pieces of memory about that time are the doctor coming to our house and nearly gagging me with that tongue depressor. I have hated that part of doctor’s appointments since. I’m thinking that our house was quarantined with a paper at the front door. I also remember my father bringing home Silly Putty, though I don’t remember whether it was for this illness or another. But there are no other memories of the illness.

When I returned to school, I had extra milk to drink from when I was away. Perhaps my parents had pre-paid the milk allowance. Anyway, I disliked milk. At the time I probably couldn’t articulate why I didn’t like to drink milk. It gave me stomach aches and it is likely that I was lactose-intolerant, especially to cow’s milk, which was all that was available at the time. One of my younger siblings was allergic to some kind of milk and drank a different version of the formula that was darker in color.

So, there was this extra milk they were trying to get me to drink each day. The cartons were those made of wax-covered paper, square in shape with a flip cap. We had a small straw to suck out the milk. It was also too much liquid to drink in one setting. I don’t remember how I settled the situation. Today I would find another classmate who wanted or needed to have the extra carton and quietly slip it to them.

I don’t remember the teacher or her name. The kindergarten classroom was in a separate building from the primary school building that held grades one through five. Neither building is there today in Pittsburg; a housing development was built on that downtown property. My mother may have walked me to and from school, as it was just three blocks away. Kindergarten began in the fall of 1959 and by then there were three children: me, my brother, Steve, who was three, and my brother, Jonathan, nearly two. She also would have been pregnant with my sister Danna, who would be born in 1960. I can imagine the old large medal strollers. Jonathan would be seated, Steve standing on the back holding onto the back of the seat, and I probably walking along.

Memories are precious and the point of writing these down is to share with my family my life experiences and adventures. Luckily, I have photos and documents to help with the details of the memories. For my first four years, a baby book has many of the memories of my early childhood written by my mother.

We had written about this before here and now I have expanded on it.

Copyright © 2022 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.