Janet's thread

 My father was born in 1891.  He was one of 5 children who grew up in this house on Buena Vista Hill, Newark Ohio – photo taken 1960.

By coincidence my sister Nan spent a year in Newark from March 1960-1961.  At that time, a relative of my father by his first marriage, contacted my sister and told her where my father had lived in his youth.  So my sister went and found the house and took this picture.  One thing she remembers my father telling her was that in the winter the children used to go sledding and his older sister would pretend to be hurt and need to be pulled back up the hill.  And one thing I remember is that when the children had been naughty their mother made them select their own switches from one of the fruit trees so that she could punish them accordingly.  My impression is that she was quite a mild person and I would like to think that she was strict but that her punishments were not too severe.  There were 3 boys and 2 girls to try to keep in order.  Her husband, my father’s father, died in 1897 leaving her with the 5 children to raise.  I asked my sister what our grandmother did then to support the family.  Nan said that Grandma would have had my grandfather’s Civil War Pension.  And she worked at Newark County Court House, presumably doing office work.  Eventually the children grew up and dispersed but I don’t know at what point the house was sold and my grandmother went to live with her daughter Myrtle who was living in Raleigh North Carolina.  The oldest daughter, Aunt Ruth, was in Indianapolis Indiana, twice married but no children.  This is the research thus far on those early years on that side of the family.  Those unknown aunts and uncles and cousins.

I have been scanning photos of my maternal grandparents.  They were married in 1906, had twin girls in 1907, another daughter (my mother) in 1912, and another daughter in 1913.   Here are a few of the photographs of the young family.   What is particularly interesting to me is that in these young faces I can see the more mature adults that they eventually became.  But I find this hard to write in that one of the twins did not even reach adolescence.  Even though I of course never knew Aunt Elizabeth’s twin sister Helen, still the sorrow of this young family on losing one of the twins hurts.  The loss of a young life is so poignant.  Diptheria was a common cause of death in the earlier part of the last century and that is what I have been told happened.  Four daughters then became three.  Now today in 2010, Aunt Alice, the one surviving member of this once-young family has passed her 97th birthday.

   my grandfather, my mother as a toddler, her sister Helen (the twin who died)

  my mother, 4 weeks old, held by her father

  Aunt Elizabeth with my grandmother soon after my grandmother gave birth to my mother

  my grandmother, my mother a few hours old

  Aunt Elizabeth behind, Aunt Alice on the left, my mother on the right

   my mother, Aunt Alice, Aunt Elizabeth

   My grandfather’s sister Gussie (Augusta), Fred my grandfather and May my grandmother, 1930

The above photos were part of my mother’s “archive” which I found in her home in Hawaii after she passed away 10 years ago in 2000.  I took (or sent) the photo albums back to Dublin, saved them in a chest in our garage there, and then last year sent them back across the Atlantic to our new home here in Seattle.  Now I am making the time to examine and preserve these treasures.  One of the albums belonged to my greataunt (my grandfather’s sister) who lived with the family.  There is a little label in the front of the album showing that they lived on Capitol Avenue in Omaha Nebraska.  I know my mother was born in Minneapolis.  So far I haven’t been able to establish exactly when they moved from Minneapolis to Omaha.