Born Virginia Maude Crofford on March 3, 1932 in Waukegan, Illinois, she moved with her family to Norfolk in 1942. (Although she had her 11th birthday party in Waukegan according to a newspaper article - maybe her father Horace moved here ahead of his family). The Croffords first lived in Portsmouth with a family friend (Souter) who urged them to come to Norfolk for job opportunities.
Virginia grew up in Norfolk, attended Maury High School and the William and Mary campus in Norfolk, married John Beverly Zaun in 1952, and raised two daughters in the then rural Kempsville area of Virginia Beach. Her life and her many accomplishments are memorialized in a collection of documents kept in the Zaun family binder.
Her passing has unleashed a fresh new interest in organizing and preserving family documents. It has been a tedious task to carefully sort through so many papers and photos, especially since she obsessively kept a dozen or more copies of everything! I am going through them with a fine-toothed comb, looking for bits of information that I may have missed in my ancestry research. Some of the family documents may have some historical significance and will need some follow up.
As my sister and I are going through all of Mom's keepsakes and memorabilia, it becomes more clear exactly how much of one's life lives after them.
