When my husband and I were planning our very inexpensive wedding back in 1994, we were in college and on a tight budget. Our families helped pay for parts of the wedding but none of us had a bunch of money set aside for a fancy affair, which was just fine with me. I’m not a fan of putting on a dress and getting all dolled up. We were twenty years old at the time, and now that I have a son who is 19, I can only imagine what our families were thinking. But never fear, here we are almost 26 years later, still going strong!

Someone suggested that we needed to have wedding napkins. I don’t remember who that was now but I can remember thinking at the time that wedding napkins seemed like a weird and frivolous thing. In an effort to please, I ordered up some wedding napkins. We did not have a big fancy dinner. We had “gourmet” sandwiches (made by a local restaraunt, not Subway), a few sides, cake, and no alcohol or music because, remember, we were 20. Not old enough.

I want to thank whomever suggested the napkins. During my “box adventures” unpacking the box from my grandparents’ house I shipped to myself over ten years ago, I have found a couple of other wedding napkins from family members.

Helen and Dick are my Uncle Dick Dimick, brother to my grandmother, and his wife Helen who was known as “Pinky” who recently passed away and I wrote about a few weeks ago. My grandparents’ napkin isn’t printed. Instead, it has a handwritten notation “March 3, 1945 Margaret Ruth & Carl.” I suspect this was written by someone not as familiar with the family, and definitely wasn’t written by an immediate family member, because my grandpa spelled his name with a ‘K’ – Karl Miller. So it is curious how that got into my grandparents’ collection of stuff…but I’m ever grateful it did!

As my daughter was going through the items to scan, she said “a napkin???” Yes, indeed, even a napkin can have genealogical significance.