One section of the Project Old is Gold historic preservation patch guide asks about what personal heirlooms do we preserve? One of the only things I wanted from my late paternal grandmother was this nail.

She treasured it as her father, my great-grandfather Joseph Walter Scott, was a carpenter. Here he is…

It was from a church he built in Henderson, NC in the early 1900s. Given my love of architecture and my chosen career, I didn’t want that piece of my family’s history to be lost.

As for traditions, every year my maternal family goes back to our family land in rural Louisa County, VA that belonged to our g-g-great-grandfather, who was also a master carpenter. We have a ranch house and my g-great uncle’s cottage still stands. One of the things we do every year is to clear and clean up our family cemetery.

We used to spend the entire month of August there, but now that my former schoolteacher grandmother and great-aunt are elderly, we just go down on the weekends. Even that tradition has only been in the last two years. The great thing about traditions is passing them on, so now I get to take my sons there too.

Like my nail and family home, preservation is also about those tangible connections to the past. That sense of place and continuity for generations to come.

We are in the home stretch of finishing the guide and earning our patches! You can follow along with Kate as she earns hers too!