My grandma had a Brother typewriter. It held one line of text at a time in a computer and let you make revisions and then it printed it. I was so young, and so unaware of other family types, that I didn't really make a distinction right away between her Brother typewriter that she used to write letters, and her Brother that she sent letters to.
My grandma had a music box with a ballerina in a yellow dress inside, she spun around and my grandma sang "a pretty girl is like a melody" to the tune. The outside looked like a 'ski chalet' in a old fashioned fantasy. Bright yellows and blues. A low wood shingle roof, round timbers on the walls, fake snow. I still sometimes think my family looks at their ancestry in that way. Whatever is actually there is too painful in some way, so they prefer the packaged thing, the tourist version, as if it isn't their own history.
