This is a family reunion from about 1921. Our archivist/my great-grandmother, Kaye, is the third from left in the front row - the angry-looking child with the accentuated forehead. She also helpfully labeled herself along with everyone else in the original image. The oldest couple in the center are her grandparents on her father’s side. This is a sub-section of the full reunion photo, which has several times this number of people in it.
I’m grateful for the labels, but man some of them were a pain to remove for this project.
Many of the people on the left side of this photo lived next door or across the street from each other.
The kid in the front labeled Chuck grew up to be the low bar by which you measured yourself in the family community. If you weren’t doing what Chuck was doing, you were doing okay. His house and yard were a mess, with chickens in the house and siding falling off the outside. Kaye’s parents lived next door so they planted massive hedges to try to keep the sight and association away as much as possible.
Kaye’s mother, Thresea, helpfully labeled as ‘MOM’, was usually called Tressie, and that’s actually what is on her tombstone, but they pronounced her proper name 'Thress-ee-uh’, which my grandmother suspects is just because someone did not know thst that’s how you spell “ter ee sah”. That was a really exciting discovery for me because that’s something that I would never have found any way but talking to someone who knew her.
Anyone who knows the story of the dog bringing home the human foot, that’s Grandpa Ben in the middle there in black with the white tie. That’s information I already knew, but since we’re here, here you go.
The other info is that Kaye’s sister Ann is missing. So either the baby listed as Delmar in Tressie’s arms is actually Ann, or she waa actually the baby of the family and not Del like grandmother remembers. Or she was home sick or something, I guess. So I’m gonna dig for Ann this week.
Also details about Aunt Della, but that’s going in another post, along with a story that is still upsetting me about a son someone in this photo had named David.
