Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.
Five Girls On A Boat : Third Party Print (1920s)
Four little ones
One on a child-sized chair. Three on the ground.
Three are looking at the photographer’s helper,
who must be doing something to hold their attention.
But one has his attention on someone off to the side.
Who are these children?
Another copy provides names.
Billye Winston Larry Dorinda
Billye and Dorinda are sisters.
Winston and Larry are brothers.
The two sets of children are cousins.
They are all cousins of my father, Jerry Smith.
Here they are again.
The boys are in different places.
Dorinda is off to the side
and so is the attention of all the children.
I wonder if this photo was taken first, then Dorinda was moved in closer.
And someone made an extra effort to turn those eyes to the front.
What is written underneath Dorinda? I asked her:
One of my nicknames was Dindy. sometimes called Dindy Dimples, because I had double dimples. They don’t show in pictures though.
Billye is also a nickname.
Her given name is Wilda.
The year was 1939. The photo was taken in Iowa.
Those bare feet say “summertime.”
Another photo taken the same day.
Wilda must have been very fond of that chair.
Again, the better copy has no names, but they are provided on this one.
Myron – Mike Smith, my dad’s brother, son of Abbie
Father – M. D. Webber, my great-grandfather, father of my grandmother Abbie.
Billy – Wilda
Abbie – my grandmother
Dorinda
????? I cannot read what is written. The woman is my great-grandmother, Dorinda Strange Webber, Abbie’s mother. Abbie wrote Father to identify her father, but that doesn’t look like Mother or Dorinda.
Winston
Gerald, my father (Jerry), son of Abbie
Laird – Laird Addis, father of Winston and Larry
Larry
My dad and his brother Mike are dressed like the farm boys they were.
I don’t know the reason for the gathering that day in Iowa City,
but it looks as though it was a happy time.
This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday. Please visit other participants here.
I like how natural the photos are with the kids looking in all different directions.
Yes, I love natural photos too. It makes me think that someone pulled out the camera and caught them looking at something together, then decided to get a more posed photo.
Precious photos of a large family of brothers and sisters and cousins – much like my own paternal family except now we’re all in our 70s & 80s! 🙂 The two names – Dindy and Wilda struck a chord. My husband’s mother, Virginia’s younger sister called her Dindy, and we have a dear neighbor, Wilda, nearing her 103rd birthday!
This is only a small group of a very large group of cousins. The remaining cousins are mostly in the same age range as yours.
Love it!
Glad you approve. You were a cutie!
I love the first photos of the four little ones. How difficult it must have been trying to get them to all look the same way at the same time. I am imagining that the older children from the last photos were probably distracting the little ones.
You may be right. Watching the big kids.
Most of my old family photo albums have no notes in them. Drives me crazy sometimes! 🙂
Oh, I know! Fortunately, my grandmother was good about identifying people much of the time. But not always!
These are so cute. In that first photo, Larry looks like he was caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.
Larry makes me smile every time I look at this! He does look guilty. I wonder what was going on in his little mind?
A photo is definitely worth 1,000 words — and these photos are lovely. To have so many family members in one group shot, and to have labeled copies — those are genealogy gold!
I feel very lucky to have these photos and others from an album my grandmother kept.
There is a special quality in old faded photos that you can only see when they are strung together in a set. The warm sepia tone glows from the Iowa sunshine. I bet you can smell that summer grass in the paper. The roll of film in those old cameras only took 10 or twelve photos, so the sequence of your set really takes us into the moment. We can almost hear the children’s giggles and the soft chatter of the adults.
Thank you for your comments, Mike. I am fond of this set of photos and how it captures the young cousins one summer day.