Between The Lines: Documents and Photographs

By: Rachel S., Morris M., Sarah S., Sarah M.

Birth certificates, wedding invitations, and all other types of documents. That’s what we found in our search through our families’ belongings. What do these documents mean? They represent something important that happened in our family history. For example, birth certificates represent someone’s birth. A passport allows someone to travel from country to country. A wedding invitation states the names of a couple who was planning to get married. Manifests are lists of people who traveled on a boat.

But if you read between the lines of a manifest, you can see how old a person is or where he came from. You can tell with whom he traveled, and what his occupation was when he boarded the ship. If you read between the lines of a birth certificate, you can see where and when the person was born. There is a document showing the residence of a family in Poland. A wedding invitation tells us the location and date of the wedding and we can probably figure out how old the bride and groom were at the time. Sometimes it tells the names of the parents as well.

All documents show something interesting about a person and their life. That is why documents are an important part of a family’s heritage.