Melissa Willis 8/26/24 Melissa Willis 8/26/24

Heritage Journal - Maternal Grandma, Eve Stanton

My Grandma, Eve Stanton, was (as so many of us are) wild & complicated, accomplished & haunted.

So, I knew that when I first sat down to work on her Heritage Journal spread, limiting myself to two pages would be a challenge. Truly, how do you boil 80 years into two pages when it’s supposed to represent the only Grandparent you really knew as a child and spent so much time with?

Melissa Willis 6/24/24 Melissa Willis 6/24/24

Oral History & Faulty Recall: Leah Stanton

Inaccuracies are caused by faulty recall; there is no factual research to discover heights of buildings, dates of demolition, blood types

Melissa Willis 5/3/24 Melissa Willis 5/3/24

On being bold & queer, across generations

Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.

Melissa Willis 4/10/24 Melissa Willis 4/10/24

Deliria by Eve Stanton, 1933

I live in a room that is straight and bare,

With rings on my fingers and thorns in my hair

And I hear all night against my door

The pounding hands of the days before.

Melissa Willis 4/12/23 Melissa Willis 4/12/23

Hannah Ann

It seems fitting that, to properly begin sharing about my personal family history in this space, I must start with Hannah. From her I can work forwards and backwards in my maternal line as I share more individual stories, but in my mind, it all begins with her, the pebble tossed in the pond of my mind and heart as a small child, and from which the ripples expand.