WANDERINGS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT
BY GAYLE STUART
Call it a clan; call it a network; call it a tribe; call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
I hope all of you have had a good holiday with your family and friends. All of us in the Midwest can remember what the weather was like last year, when we wondered if we would be able to have our gatherings. This year the rest of the country has had the same thing to think about.
It is always fun to get together to remember past gatherings and help younger family members learn about older relatives and about customs that have been passed down. We have had fun teaching some how to play cards or board games. What our family likes to do is to go outdoors to climb snow piles, walk over the top of fence lines, if the snow is deep enough, and to go sledding.
Of course, we all like to eat. Some of us have special bars, cookies or main course foods that seem to only show up at Christmastime. I’m sure we can all think of something our mother, grandmother or aunt fixed that we wish we knew how to make.
In the last couple of months, WGS took on a project for our corner of the library. We voted to have some cabinets, bookshelves, and a table for the microfilm reader built. They are now in place and look very nice. This project has been a large undertaking and we hope to cover all expenses with dues, fees charged for doing research, memorial money, and other donations.
We now have the huge task of getting all of our holdings labeled and put in an easy-to-use order.
A number of our members have been working on projects. We have been putting obituaries in notebooks, not just for the two cemeteries in Walnut, but for the surrounding area also. Photos of all the houses and businesses in town have been taken. We continue to work on who owned and who lived in each of them. The businesses downtown sometimes changed ownership more than once a year. We use back issues of The Walnut Bureau for finding information, along with other resources that we have. The papers go back to 1878 and are very interesting to look through.
Come join us on Tuesday afternoons if you would like to help with any of our projects.
gbs