Making Up History

Mom found this picture in one of her many albums.  The original size is about 2 inches square, so with her macular degeneration it was impossible for her to identify anyone even using her enormous magnifying glass, until my sister took the photo home and blew it up.  I love that expression.  We all want to blow things up. 

I tried various things with it, but the larger and more clear I tried to made it, the more obliterated were the fine details.  This will have to do I guess, blank looking faces and all.

The four small children in the picture are baby cousin Audrey way in the back held by her dad, Uncle George, who was married to Edna, mom’s sister, second from the left on the bottom.  I wish I could just point.  But that would be WAY too easy.  The two little girls in the center are my (sort of) (second?) cousin Betty and me.  Betty is being held by her older half sister Mary, (her adopted brother Alma is way in the back) and I’m in front of Mary and Betty’s mom, Amy,  second wife of grandma’s brother Iden (his first wife’s name was Abbie), and he’s that bespectacled face also way in the back beside baby Audrey.   Does your head hurt yet?  It gets worse.  Dad’s face is between those of Audrey and George.  Obviously little thought was given to placement here – just snug up and make sure your face is visible.   The contemplative little boy on the right is my brother Ron, thinking, Gawd Almighty, what possible future is there for me with all these weirdos in my recent past.  Or maybe he’s just thinking he shouldn’t have eaten those last 6 spoons full of Christmas pudding.

My sister (who at this point in history wasn’t even born yet) and I were feeling pretty smug about being able to identify so many of the people in this shot.  Robert-John and Levi were two old bachelors who lived together and came to church every Sunday.  I’m not sure if they’re actually related to us in some way or not,  but I do remember the church ladies always doing church lady stuff for them both all the time.  Thus the invitation to Christmas dinner.  Grandpa William Scott’s brother Jimmy is the other little face in the back wearing glasses.  Lot’s of people who knew him remark that my brother resembles him in many ways.  Mom and grandma are behind Ron, going up and to the left.  Grandma Scott had a lot of younger siblings, all brothers, and three of them are in this photo – Iden, Carl and Jack.  Jack’s wife Nellie (who my grandma never liked much) is right up front and their son Alan is squatting on the left, holding some kind of thing that looks like it might be a camera.  Alien tracking device seems a little far fetched for the 1950’s.  But nothing would surprise me.  Grandpa’s skinny little face is to the right of grandma’s, and their son Gomer’s chubby one is to the left.  

Mom was quite happy to get the identification thing all sorted out, but the thing that made her positively gleeful was figuring out WHERE the picture was taken.  I would have thought that the big leafy wallpaper would be a dead giveaway, but apparently everyone had paper like that.  (Everyone??  No one had any taste at all?) But mom chose to ignore those comments as she pointed out the ceiling to us, and told us that she remembered that it was a silvery metal kind of panel, and so this of course had to be her maternal grandmother’s living room!  Who could forget such an interesting ceiling?  Well, yes, who indeed?  We had to admit, nobody would be likely to ever completely get that out of their heads.  I’m guessing that great grandma passed this house along to one of her sons, and maybe it was Jack, and maybe that’s why grandma had a hard time liking her sister-in-law Nellie who got a house for nothing and Jack besides.  Or maybe that’s all pure conjecture and Nellie was just a bag that nobody liked.   

The other thing we discussed at length was “who took this picture?”  It really doesn’t make any difference, but mom was having such fun telling us why all our guesses were probably wrong that it kinda spurred us on.  Somebody’s spouse?  Alan wasn’t yet married.  This might have been before Carl married Julia.  Or after she died.  Or his first wife died.  Or was he even married twice?   Alma was too young to have met Shirley yet, and Mary was too young to have met Ross.  We kept throwing out random names of future couples.  Alan had a brother Bob who was kind of a black sheep and ran off to Cuba at one point in his life, so he probably didn’t even show up for Christmas – another reason to think less of poor old Nellie.  She really couldn’t do anything right.

Eventually we gave it up, but now that I’ve looked at it all again, the obvious missing person is Mom’s sister Mabel.  She was the picture taker in the family, and the only missing sibling of the four of grandma’s children, so I’m thinking it had to be her.  There are dozens of pictures of us and our cousins taken by her.  She married late, so when she was the only one without a bunch of kids, she had the time.  And aunts always think little kids are way too cute for words, take dozens of pictures of them and then go home alone with a huge sigh of relief. 

So are all the mysteries solved?  I wish we had time to do this with every picture mom has, but we don’t want to exhaust her with our questions or get her too exasperated with all our making fun.  (Like laughing at the names Alma and Gomer.  Come on.  Who does that to their kids?) 

Aw, well.  Families are fun.  Figuring out relationships and directions that lives took can be an intriguing process.  Especially when you fill in the blanks with big doses of imagination.