Her Father’s Roses

I cannot know for sure what made me so fascinated by this assortment of objects and documents, but I know that it would not have meant what it did without my mother’s commentary. Her passion for our family’s past was intensely personal and deeply infectious, and it was her transparent love for, and commitment to, the characters within the archive that made it come alive for me. From a very young age she made me see my family inheritance as something special and exclusive, magical even, and I willingly joined in. I sat with her on the floor, documents spread around us, meticulously dating, identifying and ordering.  I remember poring over photographs and negatives with a magnifying glass, carefully scanning the increasingly familiar images. I remember our wonderful trips to the Czech Republic, unearthing new documents, visiting museums, arguing with archivists.