This is Kaye’s maternal grandmother, so this is my … great great great grandmother.  I had to think about that because I don’t really think about all these people as connected to me so much as to each other.  I know this woman more as Tressie’s mother, not my Great x3 Grandmother.  Her name is Elizabeth, like so many others.  Another extremely mild fix, I just wanted something decent to put on her page on the family tree website I’ve been adding all this nonsense to.  She was born in 1869 and died in 1926.   I don’t know anything about where or when this was taken, but I still thrill to the idea that I have pictures of people going back so far like this.   I know I’m not going to get this lucky with all branches of the family!

That there are photos of this man is a big deal to me.  

There are lots of really wild and complicated details and twists and turns in the thing, but the short story is that this is my grandfather’s biological father who died in a car crash when my grandfather was about five years old.   I did not know we had any photos of him.  I certainly did not know that we had everything we do on him.  (I have every single receipt that my great-grandmother got for services related to his accident, hospitalization and subsequent funeral.  It is Overwhelming.)

I’d been looking for why everyone was telling me my family was Scottish and was finding it exactly nowhere until I discovered this cache of photos and details from this man’s family.  

So this is sort of a non-eventful image cleanup, but it’s a big deal for me to have it.

I don’t have nearly as much from my grandfather’s side of the family - I think many of the photos and things went to his sisters when his parents died. This photo of my grandfather and my great-grandfather at my grandfather’s graduation was so yellowed I almost didn’t think it had originally been in color.  

I miss them both.

Photo restoration time again~

Bert and Tressie, Kaye’s parents and so my great-great-grandparents, in the front, and Carrie, Bert’s sister in 1911.  Not a lot to say about this one clean-up-wise, I am just fond of all of this headgear.  Tressie’s in particular - I’m not even sure what’s attached to what there. 

Tressie is what started this whole journey.  A single photo of her sitting on my grandmother’s table when I visited her house to help clean out alerted me to the presence of much older photos than the ones I came for.  My heart still despairs that they might sell the house without finding all the photos and that the ones of me with my grandfather will be gone, but I’m so glad that I at least got the ones I have.

Restoration on an old family photo, one again!

Uncle Harry here absolutely towers over the rest of the family in group photos and every time I see him, I am reminded of the mummy of Seti I.  

His given name was Horace.  I think he did well just sliding into Harry instead.  He is my great-grandfather’s uncle, but trying to discern what that makes him to me is just ridiculous.  He’s Uncle Seti Harry.

My Great-Great-Grandmother (Great-Grandfather’s Mother), Elizabeth. A very quick clean and adjustment. This is probably the photo of I have of her at her youngest and written on the back of this photo is her maiden name, where she’s called Lizzie.  My cousin currently goes by Lizzy and seeing this commonality charms me a bit. 

One of the things that has been interesting about having this stash of pictures is not only recognizing people now, but recognizing them fondly.  I don’t know what they were like, and a lot of them were from a time and a mindset so far from my own that I doubt they would have approved of me in so many ways, but I still am beginning to think of them very fondly as family.  I smile when I see many of them and despite their births being 100 years before my own, I’ve been really struck by seeing some of their obituaries, like I’ve lost people I knew.   I have a photo of this woman’s funeral, even.