The cute trio from my family glass negatives before and during my meddling.  

There’s a lot of tiny shit still happening in this image, with a lot of adjustments to make still, but I spent a long time giving some love to this image from the family photo stash, so you can look at the deceptively undramatic comparison.  This image is one of my favorites, although I don’t know who the people in it are.  I have some clues as to where I could go in family tree to find out, but it will still be a good bit of digging.  This is one of the glass negatives, so it feels extra special.  

I want to do some actual drawing though, so I’m stopping on the obsessive texture fixing for now

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.

Tonight, a photo op at my grandparents’ university.  My grandfather is on the left, and this is the first time I’ve really been able to see the red hair everyone was always telling me he had, then my grandmother (the one who is the reason I have all this stuff), her great aunt V, her mother (our Kaye!), Kaye’s mother Tressie, and Kaye’s father Bert.  

Looking at the new image further away, I should correct the band of a bit reddish business across the top.  That wasn’t as obvious when the image was larger.  But still!  Fun!

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.

This is more like what Aunt Abbie looked like when my grandmother knew her, though I have more pictures of her when she was younger.  Grandmother says Aunt Abbie is the kind of aunt everyone wishes they had - she always came for your birthday with presents and was endlessly patient when you were a little kid who wanted to do repetitive tasks over and over. 

The day Aunt Abbie died, one of my grandmother’s other aunts, Irene, called Grandmother to ask if she’d spoken to Abbie that day.  Grandmother said she hadn’t, and Irene, apparently unable to be the one to say the words, told Grandmother she ought to call over to Abbie’s house.

Grandmother called and said, “Hi, Aunt Abbie,” when the person on the other end answered the call but she quickly realized it was not her.

“Who is this?” the lady on the other end said.

Grandmother told her.  “It’s [name]!”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry, but you don’t have an Aunt Abbie anymore.”

Grandmother was too upset to handle going to the funeral.

My grandmother’s much loved Aunt Abbie is seated with ‘Grace Newton’, and I don’t yet know who she is, but I have a few ideas about how she’s connected. 

I thought Aunt Abbie was adorable before I heard more about her, but now I feel quite attached.  She died two weeks before my grandmother’s wedding and was buried in the dress she had bought for the occasion.  My grandmother crying telling me about it was really moving, so I started crying too.  

This is my great-grandmother’s Aunt Abbie, one of my great-grandfather’s older sisters.   I took a bunch of the restored photos with me to visit my grandmother today and she was in tears telling me about her Aunt Abbie, so I’m gonna post some of the restorations I’ve done of her.