My family history project

I’ve been sorting through old papers and files, preparing for my move in April. I found a file with a project idea that I never worked on, which I started researching (on a preliminary basis) when working as an academic librarian.

Here’s the idea: I’d like to write a memoir interspersed with some history — specifically, women who worked in knitting mills in Reading, PA, my hometown. The link is my maternal grandmother, who worked in a knitting mill when she was young (in the late 1920s or 1930s), which was (many years later) converted to factory outlets. When I was around the same age (in my early 20s), I worked at the outlet that had been the mill (as did my sister). So we have that connection with our grandmother’s past. I want to write about my relationship with her, and my hometown, and our work history (my own career path, from retail to clerical to professional, versus my grandmother’s more constricted journey, from factory worker to wife and mother).

Author: polishamericangirl

I'm a librarian and amateur genealogist who runs a women's memoir book club. I'm working on a memoir project about my own family. View all posts by polishamericangirl