From here to Hastings-on-Hudson

My grandfather H. Alfred Hendrich must have been a sentimental man. He kept everything from his children's graduation tassels to canceled checks marked as "Sentimental."

He also kept newspaper headlines announcing the end of World War II.

And kept satchels and suitcases full of documents, correspondences and photos that once belonged to his 2nd wife Jean Sharp, and his older sister Ida. He had outlived them both, and so found himself as the caretaker of their artifacts. I asked my father about his Aunt Ida. He remembers spending family vacations at her home along Lake George in New York as a child. I'm guessing this picture is a document to that memory:

My grandfather and great aunt were born in Roanoke City, Virginia. They moved at a young age to Hastings-on-Hudson in New York, where they lived out their childhood. This is the two of them, pictured in 1920:

As I continued to rummage through my parent's garage, it was also becoming clear that my grandfather's mother must have meant a great deal to him as well. Tucked inside a satchel, I came across a small clutch filled with sympathy cards from the time of my great grandmother's passing, along with her old passport. It was only within the past few months that I learned her name: Frieda Goetz.

It was becoming evident that my father had stored Alfred's things away in our garage without having opened or gone through them himself. Maybe he was too stricken with grief at the time to deal with it, or somehow felt a duty to hold onto these things simply because his father had chosen to. Whatever the reason, I quickly discovered that the Hendrichs's tendency to hang onto their ancestors's belongings has been a pattern that's been repeated now for several generations.