The set of scrapbooks are in the closet, I will photog retrieving them again.

They are for sale, as a set, along with all the research. Details of the estate sale (near Washington, D.C. are with the collection.

I made a tree on ancestryDOTcom and I have freely shared all the scans with all descendants and family and I have tried to protect the photos and names of the living. We must downsize, the collection needs a good home.

I can’t remember now, are there two or three scrapbooks, and I never counted the number of photographs, cards, letters, newspaper clippings, flyers and hand written notes all throughout the pages.

 

 

The grandmothers made it easy to find them and their families – page after page they wrote names to the pictures of themselves and their grandchildren.

 

Researching the club’s grandmothers was such a pleasure, tracing the ancestry and descendants for each of them and finding many and sharing their family photos with the descendants. Some of the photos of the grandchildren are the descendants who have been found them selves.

The tree I made from the scrapbooks has 485 people, 232 photographs, 9 stories, and 571 records attached for toughly 50 grandmothers who are named in the club scrapbooks

I could not walk away from the collection and I had to at least try to get copies back to family. This is not the only collection of pictures and scrapbooks and pictures I have brought home there is also the Winpenny Collection, and … There is also the Francisco de Miranda Expedition Collection coming soon as well.

From the Grandmother’s first meeting in 1938, they were the talk of the Arlington, Virginia community

 

 

 

I tried to find if the club still existed. The national club certainly still exists but I could not find this chapter still together. The Cherrydale Methodist Church was one of the larger meeting places they used besides many meetings in homes and other outings as a group but I did not find any people with memory of the group of these folks.

The Cherrydale Grandmother Club seems to be active through about 1950 where they attended national conferences as well as adding local news and precious photos of grandchildren through out the decade plus.

Brochure and photo from the 1950 convention of the Grandmother Club.

 

Over the decade and a half the club was well served by several secretaries that kept these precious treasures from each grandmother.

 

Above and Below: The secretaries for the group kept the photos and family history notes added for many years. Photographs of the grandmothers, of the grandmothers with their grandchildren, sometimes with three generations, and many outings which brought together many women and their families.

 

Comfort during war and community coming out of the Great Depression these women were obviously much more affluent than many in the country and seemed to serve community and country as individuals and as a club.

Louise Kemp’s (one of the members) thank you note survives –

 

 

The surname Kemp keeps coming and so many different Kemp families – our cousin’s grandmother’s second husband is Canadian Sir Albert Edward Kemp, they are the Kemps of 1st Quebec and earlier Yorkshire. There are our friends Kemps of Baltimore and of Maryland, previously from Pennsylvania and immigrating from Germany.

Then there are a group of Ulster Irish Kemps in genealogy news right now

 

 

 

http://ggi2013.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/john-cleary-how-to-enhance-your-y-dna.html

 

 

Louise Kemp – of the Cherrydale Grandmother Club – aka the Virginia Compton Grandmother Club