Photo of the Week: John William Smith family

The poses the photographer had the family assume have always been interesting to me. He was obviously taking artistic license with the ONE PICTURE I have of this family. Dude, really? I can't even tell what half of them look like.

Oh, well, I suppose that in a hundred years our descendants will check out pictures like this one and bust a gut laughing. But at least my family was TRYING to be serious.

From left to right, top row: Maurice or Shelby, Ruby looking very thoughtful and possibly lost, Jennie lovingly brushing lint off John's shoulder (I'm going to assume it was lint)

From left to right, bottom row: Mary Elizabeth, John holding John Jr. (always called Jack), and Maurice or Shelby.

Maurice is my great grandfather and I'm bugged that I can't tell which one of the boys he is. The birth order is Ruby, Maurice, Shelby, Mary Elizabeth and Jack, and if only I could ask the boy sitting on the right to stand up, I could measure their heights and possibly decide. Since I can't, you know, see his face.

But they tried. Bless their hearts.

Photo of the Week: 9 March 2008

Grandma Keithler (my great grandmother) and me, in the living room of her little house up on 102nd Avenue in Vancouver. I see this little home quite often while we're driving around town, and while I don't have any memories of being there, it makes my heart go pitter-pat to think that people I loved once lived there. Poppy, Grandma's husband, planted a sequoia tree in their front yard - if I'm not mistaken, that's the same tree in the window - which is still there and now huge. My memories of Grandma are still pretty tender - she died when I was twelve, and I still remember her voice and what she smelled like (pretty).

Some things I've heard about Grandma are that when she was young and lived in Montana, her father owned a livery barn in town. When new people moved into town, it was Grandma's job to drive them to their new property in the old Model T her dad owned. She had to drive backward whenever they went uphill, because if she drove forward, all the gasoline would go to the back of the tank and the engine died. Grandma also played the piano for the silent movies at her local theater.

Grandma's mother Lena died in the influenza epidemic, her father John died five years later, and two of her three brothers died at young ages; as a mother, she lost two of her three children within seven years of each other, also relatively young. She was a tough lady, quite used to having to work hard, and didn't put up with much nonsense. Yet she was sweet. When I was a little girl, about seven years old, we all took a trip to the beach and we kids took our shoes off to play in the sand. Afterward, I had sandy feet I had to wipe off before I could put my shoes back on. My aunt's younger sister, Dena, sat me on the car and wiped my feet off for me. Grandma noticed us, smiled big and said to me, "Spoiled!"

She put butter in her tomato soup and only ate "Hollywood" bread. She owned a little pink plastic Ferris wheel for her spools of thread and a green flocked turtle pincushion with tiny black plastic glasses and a knickknack of small, rainbow-colored birds flying above a plastic base and a paperweight of clear plastic with a red rose inside and a green metal stool with a pull-out step. I loved visiting her home and seeing her little "treasures." We watched Lawrence Welk at her home on Saturday nights. Sometimes she would watch us out her little hallway window, when she lived next door.

I miss her.

Photo of the Week: March 2, 2008

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A couple of hotties get married in 1942 (you can read more about that here).

My Neenaw is one of the most beautiful brides I've ever seen. I am lucky to look anything like her. Gran's no slouch, either.

Photo of the Week: 24 February 2008

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From left to right: Grandma Alice Johnson Keen, her sister-in-law Maude Leah Keen Torvanger, and Maude's husband Bert Martin Torvanger.

I never met Uncle Bert, but we used to visit "Aunt Maudie" sometimes at her apartment in Walla Walla. I LOVED the smell of that place - old, musty, creepy - and the funky old elevators with a window in the door so you could watch yourself move between floors. It was dark and dusty in the hallways, but Maude's apartment was sweet, small and cheerful. She had funny old mauve couches that we kids would smile to each other over, and she would give us money as gifts. Mom said she boiled the coins and washed and ironed the bills before she gave them to us, and we always thought that was funny. Now I think it's absolutely adorable of her. Awww... she wanted our money to be clean.

Aunt Maude never had any children, so Grandma Dot and her sisters were Aunt Maude's heirs. Grandma Dot gave Mom some of Aunt Maude's things, and I remember old nightgowns and pillowcases and sheet sets floating around our home, all marked with the name "Torvanger."

Aunt Maude and Uncle Bert apparently bought some interest in an oil well in Oklahoma. Years later, about 2002, I was contacted about my family tree on Ancestry.com. Someone from the oil well share company was trying to find Aunt Maude's heirs because we were owed some money, and Mom and I got all excited. Wooo hooo, here comes the cash!

Reality sank in when we learned how much Mom and her three siblings would be receiving. So far, with long distance phone calls, gas money, and legal copies of Aunt Maude's and Grandma Dot's wills, it's cost Mom more than she would have earned from the oil well, just to get this thing hooked up. We're not quite as "in the money" as we once hoped - but that 25 cents a month sustains our Bazooka bubble gum habit, and really, that's all we can ask for.

Photo of the Week: 17 February 2008

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This picture is from Neenaw's house. Years ago, Gran wrote down on the back of the frame who everyone is. Last time I was at Neenaw's house, I scanned this picture and sent it home to myself - but I must have taken "neglectful genealogist" pills that day, because I didn't copy their names down. Next time I'm at Neenaw's, I'll do that.

I do know that the man sitting in the middle of the front row - the "thorn among the roses" - is my 3rd-great grandfather Thomas William Zane, and the woman with the dark hair standing behind him is his wife, Susan Virginia "Jennie" Cummings Zane - both of them beautiful, of course. "Not an ugly one among us!" Thomas and Jennie are my great grandmother Ruby's grandparents, so this might be the farthest-back picture I have of any of my ancestors. They are pictured with other members of Thomas' family. His father, Jonathan J. Zane, died when he was very young, and his mother remarried Mr. Wright and had more children, so I imagine these are his siblings and their spouses.

Thomas is in another picture at Neenaw's, with his band in Sundance, Wyoming. The nifty thing is, we had that picture of the Sundance Band and knew he was in the picture, but didn't know which band member he was... until we saw this picture above. Those whiskers don't lie.

UPDATE: While I was cleaning out my email inbox this weekend - all 47 pages' worth - I found this note I emailed to myself from Neenaw's, with the NAMES on the back of this picture. So here you go:

Standing, left to right: Adelia Ermine Wright, Jonathan Haines, Arthur Haines, Susan Virginia "Jennie" Cummings Zane, Silas Wright, Frank Bryson Murray

Sitting, left to right: Della Haines, Mary V. Wright Haines, Thomas William Zane, Clara S. Mason Wright, Nellie Margaret Wright Murray

Gran wrote: "This picture was apparently made after 1890 in Michigan as Elizabeth Ann Zane moved to Wyoming in 1890. Jesse Zane would be over 20 years old in this picture. T.W. Zane would be between 45-50 years old."

Mystery solved.

Photo of the Week: 10 February 2008

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The Dysarts, playing in the snow - driving through the Blues, maybe? Or in the Mt. Hood area?

This is from one of those funky old cameras that put two images on the same photograph. On the left we have my grandfather, Carl Byron Dysart Jr., with some really tall snow, and on the right, his parents, Carl and Ruth (Ackley) Dysart, looking more animated than I'd ever seen them (click on the picture to see their big smiles).

You know how those old pictures are - no one could smile and everyone was all dressed up and they always looked so... sedate. You would never know that a half hour later, they'd be changed out of their Sunday best and out slopping the hogs or something.

This is from the late 1930s-early 1940s era.

Photo of the Week: 3 February 2008

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

My dad is celebrating his 65th birthday tomorrow and for a special surprise, I'm posting his favorite picture of himself (NOT). You're welcome!

What a cutie. I really do love the Alfalfa hair.

Photo of the Week: 27 January 2008

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Happy Birthday to me! (Friday the 25th)

And I'm just as stunning, all these years later.

Photo of the Week - January 20, 2008

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The Johnsons and the Keithlers, having a killer time.

From left to right: Cora Clark Johnson, Howard Keithler, Aaron Johnson, Adina Clark Keithler. Cora and Adina are sisters, and Adina and Howard are my great grandparents. Howard and Adina seem to be looking at something - was Lawrence Welk on TV yet?

I love seeing my ancestors in their "natural habitat."

Photo of the Week: 13 January 2008

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My grandmother Alice "Dorothea" Keen Dysart and me, shortly after my birth. After I was born, she came to our apartment in Seattle and visited us (notice my parents' fun cement-block bookcase behind us). I was born two days after her birthday.

"Grandma Dot" always had a beautiful yard and garden. My brother B.C. and I visited her and Grandpa for a week one summer, and since we lived on the Oregon coast and were used to milder weather, their town (Walla Walla, Washington) seemed incredibly hot. The sun would heat up their boxwood hedge by the front porch and make it smell so wonderful - the scent still reminds me of Grandma's house.

She was a funny, feisty, peppery little lady. She loved chocolates, and would buy herself a box, eat a few chocolates, hide the box, forget where she hid it, and buy herself a new box. After she died, almost-full boxes of chocolates were discovered here and there all over the house. Other than that, her house was immaculate. She played the organ and kept a notebook of the songs she practiced or played. Sometimes we'd go to her house and her organ would be turned up so loud, she couldn't hear the doorbell, but we could hear her outside. Judging from her 8-track tape collection, she loved Elvis Presley and Tom Jones. One funny discovery was a tape called "Music to Strip By."

Grandma loved keeping up with the local law enforcement, fire department, and ambulance activity, and always had at least one police scanner turned on and making noise on her hutch. She liked keeping track of the numbered codes of each department and would type up lists of the codes to post near her scanner, so she could see who was doing what. When she died, I inherited her manual typewriter and one of her half-finished scanner code lists was still in the typewriter case.

Her memorial is here.

Photo of the Week - January 6, 2008

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HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

Don't you love the ripped edges? Many of the photos I inherited from this side of the family (the Johnsons) are ripped like this - apparently it was "the thing" back then, as was gluing the pictures to the black scrapbook pages, rendering whatever was written on the back impossible to read. Other than that, it's kind of a cute idea.

It's my hunch that this beautiful lady is my great grandma Alice Johnson Keen's youngest sister, Hattie Quintilla Johnson Biersner. Sadly, Hattie died of pneumonia in the influenza epidemic, and family rumor says that she was expecting her first baby when she passed away. How heartbreaking this must have been for her husband.

Of course, they're all together now. I love happy endings.