52 Ancestors Week 2: Favorite Photo

 

I love this picture. I could look at it a million times and not get tired of it. It was taken in late 1899 or early 1900--my great-grandparents William “Jim” and Martha “Clifford” (Rouse) Gregory, with their oldest surviving child, my great-aunt Martha Jimmye. He’s about 67 in this picture and she about 26, Aunt Jimmye under a year old.

I marvel at how dark my great-grandpa’s hair is for his age and wonder why I couldn’t have gotten that gene. And I snicker at that Ed Grimley-style commitment to front-flip cowlick he is sporting. I think how young he looks for his age but then I zoom in closer and see the age on his hands, in the lines around his eyes, the faint line of a mouth underneath his facial hair. I see the familiarity of his eyes and nose, and I transfer a solid portion of my love for my grandfather to him on account of the resemblance.

My beautiful great-grandma, 40 years younger than her husband, in her be-ruffled dress with a pattern I can’t quite make out, legendary hair pulled back into some sort of figure I wish I could see the back of, hands in her lap like she’s not sure what to do with them when they don’t have a baby in them. She’d lost a baby within the last year, and has a healthy little girl to raise now, unaware but maybe hopeful of the three more to come in the next 6 years. Stepmother to 6 adult sons from his first marriage, 2 of them older than she. I wonder if they got along well, if any of her older daughters-in-law, already mothers themselves, might have been help to her with settling in and sorting out new routines, or if helping her own 5 younger siblings at home had been more than adequate experience to feel self-sufficient. There’s something I know in her face, maybe the way she holds her mouth like my own mother does when she’s considering how she wants the next thing she says to come out.

Aunt Jimmye sits happy and secure in her daddy’s lap, with her shock of hair and big light-colored eyes like his. The first to live past infancy of the five children they have together, his older daughter having died a year after she married at age 15, this baby is a treasure and a miracle, just like every other baby, and special to him on account of things beyond her own doing. I think about the challenges of getting a baby to be pleasant for today’s photographers with all their tricks and toys and soak up her contentedness at her lot.

This great-grandpa is the only son I know of my nearest brick wall, so I spend a lot of time trying to determine where he was, what he was doing, who he knew, and what his formative years might have been like. I love this picture as the bookend to the one I continue to dig for as the match.

52 Ancestors Week 1: I’d like to meet…

My paternal grandfather, Arthur Jowett, is the unmet ancestor I've known about for all of my life. He was the first of his family to be born in the US. His older brother and sister were 7 years old and 15 months old when their parents brought them to Massachusetts from Queensbury, England, their ancestral home for more generations than I’ve been able to trace. Arthur came along in 1908, 4 years after their immigration. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1965, when my dad was only 22.

1908-1965. So much that I do know that made up the dash and filled those 56 years.

He lost his mom when he was 12. He was baptized just before he was 17. He lost his dad when he was 48. He was married to my grandmother for 27 years. He became a dad when he was 34.

He was a painter in a ladder factory, a weaver in a plush mill, a house painter, a violinist with the symphony orchestra, a liquor store clerk. He was an artist who splattered magic from oils and watercolors with equal skill, a scoutmaster who sought and lead adventure and modeled service to others, a coin collector and a shorthand reader. He had enthusiastically fuzzy hair, friendly eyes with crinkles at the corners, and an imperfectly-toothed perfect smile that looks like the prelude to a hearty laugh and makes you want in on the joke.

I’d ask him all kinds of questions. Did he have a grandpa name already picked out before he died?  What was his most treasured childhood memory, tradition, toy, book? Who did his mom tell him he looked like in their family? As a boy, what did he think he would be when he grew up? What were his hardest lessons to learn? His best advice? Which one was his favorite Bible verse? His favorite dessert my grandmother made? His favorite palette knife to paint with? His favorite pocketknife to carry? Does he see anything like himself in me? Doesn’t he think my son looks like his son? 

And so I cobble together answers where I can from old records when I can scrounge them up, old pictures that surface from boxes and albums, an occasional handwritten note, and the strokes of the brush in the paintings handed down. I'm always looking for details to make the unknown more familiar, the tiny pieces of kindling that feed the fire for digging into family history and sifting through the dates to find the details that make up the dashes.