These letters by Authorene Phillips are included in the fictional Brandt family memory box that will go with the dollhouse up for auction Saturday, Aug. 26, to support the Fitzgibbon Hospital cancer center project. The snapshot is of Phillips' uncle, whose World War II journal provided some of the material for the letters. [Click to enlarge]

Most homes come with a past. This one comes with a history.

Whoever successfully bids for the dollhouse being offered by the Fitzgibbon Hospital Auxiliary during its benefit auction Saturday, Aug. 26, will also receive a memory box filled with letters, journals, stories and newspaper clippings that create a collage of family history, courtesy of the Marshall Writers Guild.

The genesis of the project came while Kathie Bennett and Norma Jeane Ferguson were finishing the dollhouse built by Wesley Kessler.

"We were down in a basement for two months," she said, and in that seclusion their imaginations started playing out possibilities. Who lived in the house? Where did they come from? What were they like?

When the dollhouse was near completion, Bennett started writing down some of the ideas she and Ferguson had spun out, creating a genealogy of the fictional Brandt family's Marshall branch. She wrote a brief profile of family members.

And then it occurred to her that the writers guild members could really do something with the genealogy as a starting point, adding the characteristics and relationships and historical details that would really bring the family to life.

From left, Marshall Writers Guild members Peggy Wickizer, Penelope Athon, Carole Schaefer, Kathie Bennett and Authorene Phillips. Bennett brought the idea to the guild of creating a history for the fictional family she and Norma Jeane Ferguson dreamed up while working on the Kessler dollhouse -- and guild members ran with it. [Click to enlarge]

They have, according to Bennett.

"It breathes life into it. It really does," she said.

The result is not a complete and thorough history but is rather the kind of "accumulated ephemera" -- as Bennett puts it -- that most families have tucked in drawers and attic boxes, a collection of bits and pieces that together provide a glimpse of the family's lineage.

The attic bedroom of "crazy Aunt Lena," who according to the fictional family's history came to live in the house late in life with her sister and later her nephew and his family. Marshall Writers Guild member Peggy Wickizer contributed fictional snippets from Lena's journal to the Brandt family memory box. [Click to enlarge]

Authorene Phillips, for instance, used material from an uncle's World War II journal to create letters from "Cousin Andy" to his Marshall relatives.

Because her uncle was her aunt's second husband who she married later in life, Phillips said she didn't really know him well, but delving into his journal gave her a better sense of who he was.

"It was a way of passing on his contribution to the war so it just didn't end up in that cigar box forever," she said.

Guild writers took care to make their contributions as authentic as possible. Phillips used old paper and envelopes, including an old 6-cent air mail stamp, and she wrote with an ink pen, leaving the small blotches that might likely have been found in correspondence of the time.

Carole Schaefer, writing a journal by Laura Schaefer Brandt, did research on the Internet to find events of the time that her character would have known about and participated in.

She had Laura go to St. Louis as a young woman and become involved in the women's suffrage movement, even participating in an arson scheme intended to draw attention to the movement.

The event was fictional, but it was the kind of thing that really happened during the period, Schaefer said.

Penelope Athon wrote about Laura Brandt's daughter, Hannah. She, too, did research on-line. But she also interviewed two people from Marshall -- Betty Swisher and Becky Haslip Hudson --who were born about the same time Hannah Brandt was and have memories of the town from the period before and during World War II.

Bennett and Ferguson thought the dollhouse attic would have been the perfect place for a spinster aunt to live, so they created "crazy Aunt Lena," the member of the family who served as caregiver, taking care of her elderly parents, then her widowed sister and finally her nephew and his family.

Peggy Wickizer drew on that idea to create a journal of Lena Metzger's life.

Bennett contributed an item to the memory box as well, a small Bible that she obtained on-line. She wrote customary birth and marriage information in the front.

Although the memory box will stay with the dollhouse, Bennett said the project need not end. There may be more to the Brandt family story to add as time goes by.

The auction will start at 9 a.m. Saturday at the First United Methodist Church New Life Center.

On the Net:

www.fitzgibbon.org/cancercenter.htm

Contact Eric Crump at

marshallfaith@socket.net