Many ladies got together in quilting bee parties to catch up on the news of the neighborhood while they stitched a quilt top with batting and a backing together. Sometimes the quilts were for the hostess' home or as a gift for a bride and groom, an upcoming baby shower, or as a commemorative memory quilt for a pastor leaving for new fields or somebody moving away. Sometimes the ladies would embroider their signature and the date on a solid square and sew it into a patterned patchwork block to be donated to a group project and sewn together with others' blocks to make a signature friendship quilt.
My mother dug around in her stash of keepsakes awhile back and found this signed bath towel. She received it at a baby shower the ladies at church gave her when I was about to make my appearance. While not paper, it is an embroidered record of members of mom's church at the time, some of whom have passed on to their reward in heaven such as Edna Thimes.
I was able to decipher most of the names embroidered on the towel and they are: Bonnie Alt, Mrs. Alt, Dorothy E., Amy Fagan, Lucille Harvey, Sarah Hite, Mrs. Leicht, Bertie Loomis, Mary Rapsilber, Frances Olson, Kathleen Sager, Edna Thimes, & Jan Tins. They were the Women of the Church of God (Anderson, IN) who attended the First Church of God in Kansas City, Wyandotte County, Kansas during the 1950's.
The purpose of this article is to tell you about FAN research. I search for the FAN's of my ancestors. FAN's are friends, associates and neighbors, so I research not only my ancestors, but also their FAN's, hoping to connect the dots (primary doc'uments) between them. You can find FAN's everywhere -- in autograph books and school yearbooks, in census records (look at the people above and below your ancestors' as the people were often neighbors), in their church fundraising cookbook, membership roster, minutes, and telephone directory, from signed greeting cards and postcards, in history books that mention Old Settlers Club and other social groups like that, sometimes in land records if remaining neighbors purchased their land, lockets containing hair, paintings or photographs, in letters, or marriage records, in newspaper articles such as auction ads or who visited whom, on cross-stitched samplers to signed quilts, scrapbooks, and towels. Hope your ancestors saved such mementoes of their FAN's, because they now become your treasured heirlooms of their friends, associates, and neighbors. Any record, fabric or paper, helps construct your ancestor's story.
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