Even though I haven’t scanned anything in a while, I have taken on a few other family history projects. My mom recently sold the house that Big Mama (Irene Strickland Smith) and Big Daddy (Kenneth Judson Smith, Sr) built on Stafford Avenue. It had fallen into disrepair over the past 5+ years without anyone living there or maintaining it, so it was sold as a tear-down. Even so, there was a lot of cleanup and sorting to do. Mom took most of it on herself, which was really an enormous feat. I helped where I could, but it was certainly not as much as I would have liked.
I did bring home with me a few things from the attic at Stafford: Grandpa’s and Big Daddy’s military uniforms, a bunch of old books belonging to various Strickland family members from Franklin County (Including Gideon Wilkes Strickland, Arthur Parris Strickland, Homer, Mabel, and Simpson Strickland), and Big Daddy’s used stamp collection.
The stamp collection was all jumbled together in a large plastic bag in the attic. When I saw envelopes and postage, I assumed it was a bag of letters and correspondence, but when I got it home, I realized it was a collection of thousands and thousands of stamps. Big Daddy was a postman, so it’s not surprising that he would take up a hobby like that, but it was still amazing to see how many he collected. I sorted through them and made a list of all the different kinds and year, and I have updated the Smith-Strickland “finding aid” with that list. I have yet to count the individual stamps, but since there are hundreds of many of those listed, I’m not too pressed to start that count.
In the same bag, there was also a big pack of letters from the Conn family of Raleigh (and Louisburg before that). This is the same Conn family as Conn Elementary in Raleigh, and some of the letters were written by Emma Conn (namesake of the school) to her brother Edward. The rest were love letters from a certain Ralph to Mamie Conn, her sister. I will likely scan those to share with any Conn researchers out there, but for now, they just get a mention. They also appear on the updated aid.
