Around 18 months ago, I came up with an idea that I thought might be fun to try....
How long would it take, and what places would we have to travel, in order to get a picture of a street sign representing the name of every immediate family member ? Kinda like a scavenger hunt.
It started out pretty easy, as many of our family names are common street names (John, Matthew, Michael). We were able to take several of the pictures in local communities.... Decatur, Clinton, Champaign, Monticello.
The goal was not to have to drive way out of our way in order to take a picture. So, for some of the more "rare" names (Corrie, Rickey, Katrina), it took some real planning. Using a couple websites, I researched the locations of the names we were still missing and kept a list going for when we headed off in that direction on a family trip.
Just this last weekend, we completed our set with a picture of "COY PARK" in Newark, Illinois. (Coy was my wife's granddad on her paternal side.)
In total, we took pictures of 29 signs:
5 my family
8 grandparents
4 parents
2 siblings
2 sibling-in-laws
2 last names
6 places (that have special meaning to our family, like Delavan and Edgar)
all of these were located within a 3 hour drive of our house, which was a very fortunate deal. I'm not sure how cooperative the family would have been taking long drives to small towns, just to snap a photo.
In tribute to our the rich heritage left by our grandparents, I wanted to feature their signs here:
The only sign that I haven't gotten that I really want to get is "HONNOLD". There are only 2 streets in the U.S. named "HONNOLD".... 1 in Iowa and 1 in Las Vegas.
Someday, my collection will be complete.....
Out for now.....
Matt