notes from away

What is Project Meeting My Grandfather?

My Grandfather, Dennis Kilbride, passed away in 1995. He was a quiet man who never spoke much of the past. My memories of him are vague but often involve a Red Sox game in the background or the smell of tobacco. I was fifteen when he died and didn’t realize at the time what I was losing.

In the Spring of 2006, my parents’ basement flooded along with half of southern Maine. The waters rose so high, it picked up plastic containers from shelves and moved them across the room. It also filled the totes with water. In some of these totes were items of my grandfather’s put aside to be dealt with one day. My parents scrambled to save the items and through the effort came across a wonderful collection of photographs.

The project was born when I visited my parents a few weeks later and brought back the collection. I took a handful to be repaired and began scanning in the collection of 150 memories. Through the process, my father and I learned little snippets of Grampy’s life, like the fact he was engaged to two women at once or that he saved so many little things.

In hopes of finding out the names of people in his photos, I posted the collection in my flickr account. Through the account, we’ve been contacted by the granddaughter of a good friend of my grandfather’s. We’ve also provided the service images to the website for his Infantry Division. A book of the photographs was printed for family members.

The project lives on as I continue to try to find the names and the stories. Through this project, I have truly begun meeting my grandfather.