I'm Still Here!

 Hi again!

I realized it's been a little while since I'd posted here, so I popped on over to see what the last thing I wrote was... AND IT WAS FROM JULY, 2023! 

When we last talked (or I last wrote, and hoped you were reading), I was posting about museum books I was reading and about some unidentifiable photos I found from my grandfather's time in the Air Force. I had plenty of time to read, and research, and write about what I was reading and researching because I didn't have a job.

But then I got a job! Woo!  It's not related to the history field or museum activities that I read about, but it is in a museum/nonprofit, so I'm kind of close to the sector I was hoping to be in. 

This doesn't give me a lot of time to read many, many museum books (or any books) and write reviews, though, and I've fallen behind on my research on my grandfather's history. Plus, I started going down the rabbit hole of USAF research: in order to know when and where some of his photos might have been taken, I decided I needed a better idea of where he was stationed and when. I went through my old files and dates that I'd gotten from my mother years ago, but decided they weren't detailed enough, so I went through ALLLLLLLL of her files again, made way more notes, started to put together a better timeline.  ... And then I realized there were a bunch of phrases and abbreviations in his paperwork that I didn't understand, and Air Force bases I didn't know, so then that became another layer of research.  So while I haven't found any new leads or concrete answers on those photos or any of the other photos I found while going through my mom's genealogy files for the hundredth time, I'm attempting to broaden my knowledge of the military, specifically the Army Air Corps / Army Air Forces / Air Force in the 1940s. 

One cool thing I did find was a yearbook from my grandfather's Training School at Mather Field from 1942. Similar to your high school yearbook, it gave an overview of the campus, talked about activities the incoming cadets had to go through (think about your Freshman orientation), classes and training that the different ranks went through, and had pictures of these classes and the individual servicemembers (!). There's my grandfather, age 20-ish, a young man just starting his career! Oh my goodness!!

The few times I get to spend time researching my grandfather's career, it is in the back of my mind of how I could articulate it in a blog post, so I do still think about you! And the few museum books I've read since July 2023 haven't been super awesome and worth going back to review -- either good or bad -- but I did kind of forget that I'd been reviewing them (Sorry). So that said, I do still think about you, I just didn't realize it had been so long since I posted, and I don't have the same kind of time that I used to have to spend reading or researching things that are worth writing about :(  But I do still exist, am still trying to research those photos and my grandfather's military career, and I am still reading (when I can) books about different aspects of museums. I'm still here!