Family Values: Lessons in Material Culture

Martha L. Brogan, University of Pennsylvania

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Reprinted from Common-Place, Volume 5, Issue 3, April 2005, 15 pages. Publisher URL: http://www.common-place.org/

Abstract

As a research librarian for the past twenty years, I have often envied the scholar who made a serendipitous discovery in the stacks — a stash of historic letters tucked inside a book, an adventurer’s lost diary, a rare book shelved alongside the ordinary. Little did I imagine that a chain of such discoveries would occur in my own life when six months after my mother’s death I traveled from my home in New Haven, Connecticut, back to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, to spend a week with my father organizing family memorabilia.