Save Family Photos

“Go and stand over there and put your arm around your brother.”

How photographing your children has changed over the years.

We had to be dragged, bribed and persuaded to 'pose' in the old days.

Love the colours of this.

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Sometimes, just a few words written on the back of photos reveal pieces of a heart. 💔

Over the weekend, I freed several photos from their magnetic album incarceration and began the process of researching the names and putting together pages for a new chapter of our family's history.

This 1900 photo is of "Uncle Dave", my great-granduncle-in-law¹, and his bride, Ida Malinda "Linnie" Myers. David was 25 when he and Linnie married. They had two children, Pearl and Claude.

David and Linnie moved a fair amount, going from Persia, Iowa, to Canada, Nebraska, and Kansas. David was a farmer through much of their lives, "retiring" from farming in 1920 and becoming a laborer in a Kansas City sawmill. By 1940 they had moved to California where Pearl and their grandson, James "Jimmie", lived.

As I researched the names on the finally-freed photos, I looked through a box of Howard family memorabilia to see if there was anything related to the photos in this album. In the box was a short stack of snapshots I had not been able to identify. Most have nothing written on the back, but three have notes written by the same hand, in the same blue ink.

"Linnie looks so natural in this picture. I was real thin, as you will observe. Jimmie has changed so much."

"I and Jimmie placed this little tree ... on Linnie's birthday Dec.20/44 ... and for Christmas too...Jimmie took the picture..."

"This was taken close up to show the reading...Jimmie and Linnie were real pals."

Linnie died March 23, 1944. Her grandson, Jimmie, was 10 years old.

Finding vital statistics provided the framework for David's story, but the notes add his heart. Just a few short sentences reveal his feelings of loss along with the love and connectedness that exists between grand-generations. ❤️

As "Mimi" to my just-turned-10 grandson, I understand this connectedness and can attest to the fact that there's nothing sweeter in all the world. ❤️

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Jorge with a big ol’ catfish. 🎣😳

Dad is pictured here with a BIG catch, along with his young cousin Richard Treviño.

This photo was taken in front of the home of his Tio Enrique, who owned the grocery store that dad worked at on San Antonio’s near eastside.

A butcher by trade, he knew his way around a meat market and had the skills to prepare this fish for frying.

Most likely taken in 1950.

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Dad took a birthday photo of me in front of the family radiogram every April 16th for the first 21 years of my life.

Why the radiogram? I've no idea, other than it was a measure to show how much I'd grown over the previous 12 months.

Dad sold hi-fi equipment for much of his working life and I guess our radiogram was cutting edge technology in the 1960s, although it had definitely seen better days by the early 1980s when the final birthday portrait was taken. I wish I still had it now though.

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Did you know, it’s family history month?! 📣 🥰

So dig into your photo collections and share some classic memories. Be sure to add

These are bathers during the 1918 Season at Saltair Resort. Pictured are my great-grandpa’s family: Cousin-in-law Ceneith Warnock; sister Ruth Hudson; Uncle Carl Obert; cousin Emma Thomas; cousin-in-law Guy Earl; cousin Florence Earl; and cousin Arthur Warnock.

Last week, I even had the privilege to connect with Arthur and Ceneith’s grandson!

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My maternal grandmother Alvera died from ovarian cancer at age 48, several years before I was born. Ovarian cancer is one of the sneaky cancers and there’s not really any good preventative screening. So as I was closing in on 50, I decided to talk to my doc about genetic screening (before i had any clue about my thyroid!). Funny/not funny I ended up having my genetic counseling appt a week after my thyroid cancer diagnosis.

Turns out thyroid cancer isn’t generally hereditary but with the ovarian cancer and lots of other cancers floating around my family tree, I was a good candidate for screening.

It took about three weeks to get results (and was not great timing because it gave me another thing to worry about!) But my results were negative for the 47 genes for cancer they tested against - yay! So that gave me some peace of mind.

It’s been a crazy couple of months!

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I love this picture of my mom that I recently came across.

As is the norm with my family photos, nothing is written on the back!

The picture was taken in 1954 somewhere in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a year before my mom immigrated to the US.

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My mom, Tommie Sue Eaves, in 1946 at sweet sixteen in Monroe, Louisiana.

Today I’m visiting with my 93-year-old mother, going through her brittle but beautiful old scrapbooks…and sooooooo appreciating that sparkle of fun loving mischief that still shows itself daily.

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Nan, my Maternal Grandmother, was born in Stratford in the East End of London on the 19th of January 1893. The first controlled flight of an aircraft lay 10 years in the future and the sight of a primitive motor car on the street was still a rare event.

As a child, she grew up in a house with no electricity, no gas, inconsistent running water, a rudimentary coal stove, a tin bath hanging on the wall in the scullery and a shared toilet in the backyard.

By the time she died in 1976, she'd survived two world wars, outlived two husbands, given birth to one child and watched men walking on the moon on her own colour television.

When this photo was taken in July 1952, Mum was 20, Grandad (who died 4 years later) 55 and Nan 59.

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Going through a very old photo album with my mom, we found this picture of her mother, standing on icy ground on their family farm, circa 1950.

I love everything about this image—the coat, the boots, the barn, and the simplicity of the composition.

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Me with my sister Miriam in 1978 in a favorite photo. (I loved that shirt too!) Miriam was too young when we left the woods to remember much about it, but she has the distinction of having been born in tiny Mountain View, Arkansas, the self-proclaimed Folk Music Capital of the World.

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The writing in the photo |
Dear A Nyo Ma Ma,
Do remember A San* from the photograph, who held an unbridled and eternal friendship with you

You hold a truly unforgettable place in my heart,
Khin San Myint
October 13, 1936

"A San" is a playful nickname for Khin San Myint, and it's a common naming convention in Burmese culture, similar to names like "A Kyi," "A Mar,” and “A Nyein”

ဒီပုံလေးကိုကြည့်ပြီး ဘယ်လိုအတွေးတွေကျန်ခဲ့လဲ

ARCHIVE : MPA-1-31-6, MPA-1-31-7

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