52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.  Week # 48 is "Overlooked".

My "overlooked" item was a scrapbook, probably begun at Christmas 1880, when it was presented to Bonny Lotta Vaughn, a six year old girl, in St. Louis Missouri.  Bonny was not kin to our family, and died of dipthiria, when she was only 9 or 10 years old.  But her mother, Margie Downer Vaughn, began filling every page completely with poems and news items cut from newspapers of the day.  Margie continued to do so after her husband died, and she married my husband's great grandfather, John McCool, in 1894.  Margie was John's second wife and may not have gotten on well with his children by his first marriage.  But she carried the scrapbook with her to homes in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado,  inserting clippings about John and his family members when events took place in their area. She even pasted the obituary of John's first wife, which we had never seen.  All the while, she filled every nook and cranny with poetry found in newspapers until the book was thick and aging.  Both John and Margie passed away in Colorado, so I have no idea how the scrapbook ended up with John's grand daughter, Mildred, in Oklahoma City.  Mildred was one of my husband's favorite aunts, and we found the scrapbook in a box in her home, along with a couple of very old Bibles and some letters.  I don't think she ever turned over the pages in the book or she would have found items about family members.  (Maybe because it belonged to "that step mother".)  So after it was overlooked in her home,  it was overlooked, still in a box,  in a cabinet in our home.  But nearly 100 years after Margie's death, her scrapbook is no longer overlooked.  We have digitized  many of the pages to share with interested persons found on line, found the gravesite of her only child Lotta Vaughn on Find A Grave, and still the scrapbook waits in a box for its next life.