Should I Display This Photo?

Posted on March 10, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

A few days ago I wrote about all the strange emotions I felt when I saw the first photo of my mother as a child. I showed the picture before, but I’ll show it here again.

After editing the photo to remove some of the shadow and enlarging the portion where my mother is visible I was overwhelmed with feeling. I felt the thrill of discovery because after resigning myself years ago to never seeing an image of her as anything younger than 22 or 23, I found her in the shadows of a photo of my Aunt Ola I’ve had all along. I felt joy that I finally knew what she looked like. Disappointment that she was veiled in shadow and I could barely make out her features. Confirmation that she was the same brunette beauty I’d seen in later photos of her. Delight that she looked like a happy, spunky little girl. And a twinge of shame at seeing her in a smudged and ill-fitting dress. I tried hard to fight off that feeling, but there it was. It overtook me before my rational side could jump in and block it. So I can toss in the feeling of disappointment at myself for that rush to judgement.

The shame went against everything I thought I knew about myself, that I observe objectively and do not judge irrationally or without considering varied facts. (I infuriate friends for refusing to take sides.) But the dirty dress went against everything I thought I knew about my mother’s family. Would I have to rethink it all?

I’ve always heard about the clockwork routine they lived to. The chores her parents expected the kids to do every morning. The hearty and complete meals that were laid out three times a day for this farm family of 12. Wash day was every Monday and ironing every Tuesday. Her mother did all that, but each Saturday the whole family pitched in around the farm. My mother’s job was to clean the upstairs. Every Saturday she scrubbed the floors, washed the basins and windows, dusted, and tidied up. Her little sister had the job of cleaning the downstairs, but since she was three years younger her mother helped her. Then Sundays were for church and a big supper, the table laden with roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans or peas, rolls, and if they were lucky, a berry pie or coconut cake.

Such disciplined routine typically means a clean and orderly household. The oldest child, my Aunt Ola, 13 years my mother’s elder, was fastidious to the point of obsession. No dirt dared enter her spotless house. And no grime dared step foot on her property. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she washed the tire treads of her car after every trip to the store. Yet there was my mother in a photo of Ola and her tidy baby boy, with my mother looking like Pigpen from the Charley Brown cartoons. Of course, it’s easy for me to justify the way she looks in the photo. Maybe it’s Saturday and she just finished washing the floors. Maybe it’s a warm spring day and she’s been hoeing rows with her mother in the garden. Or a hot summer day and she’s been playing hide and seek with her Comer cousins down at the bend. Or she’s just back from the swimming hole. The kids swam clothes and all, and this would be a perfect swim dress.

It’s easy to justify a kid being dirty. But they’re not usually photographed that way. If we know a photographer will be present we dress our children to reflect well on ourselves. And if a photo turns out less than flattering we tear it up. It’s a small manipulation of reality that helps us shape the image we want to show to the world. We take photos. We look at them and sort them, throwing out the bad ones, keeping the good ones, and choosing the great ones to display in frames. Or these days, as our home screens or screen savers. That is acceptable and normal behavior. All good, right?

Yet here I am with the only photo of my mother being one I bet her mother would not have wanted to last 84 years, as it has so far. As the only photo I have of her, I love it. And that pretty face and hair I recognize? I adore it. Pulling wider to show her leaning into the photo from over the porch rail? It makes me smile to see this joyous, impish girl who so wants to charm the camera. Even the composition of the photo is great, all angles and squares with the porch posts, house siding, chair back spindles, window frame, and my mother’s checked dress. Quite artistic. These things make me happy. Then I zero in on the dress and suddenly my emotions become very mixed. I don’t like the sour shame that creeps into my warm soup of emotions. Again, it’s easy to justify a dirty kid. But photos worthy of display can’t come with attached captions that explain the circumstances.

I sent the photo to a photo restorer and got back an improved version where some of the shadows were removed from my mother’s face and dress. It was now slightly improved, but still nothing I considered mantle-worthy. Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Her mother, my grandmother, would not want to display the photo. Aunt Ola wouldn’t either. And my mother would certainly have thrown it away. But it’s the only one I have.

Should I display the photo?

The Only Photo of My Mother’s Childhood

Posted on March 5, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

Mine is not a family of photographers. We don’t click pictures of every party or parade. We don’t all put on white shirts and jeans to sit on rocks at the beach for annual family portraits. We don’t even usually remember to document landmark events like birthdays, graduations, or meals that aren’t burnt. That requires a certain kind of self-consciousness that we’re short on. It may have originated with my grandfather, who rejected the “bourgeois life of Wall Street” and moved his family into a utopian community in the 1930s.

Whole decades are missing from our family’s life in pictures. I never thought about it much, but now that I’m older I’m beginning to think not just about where our family is going, but where it’s been. We humans nearly always feel that inexplicable connection with the homelands of our ancestors, and with our “roots.” We know there is a genetic imperative to favor family, but it’s more than that. There’s a sense of grounding, of the permanence, even immortality that comes from seeing the long line of ancestors that reaches behind you, then panning forward we can see that same line extending into the future and on over the horizon.

My family is probably better at knowing we’re related to, say, Sir Isaac Newton or steamship builder Robert Fulton, than we are at knowing our immediate ancestors. Thankfully, my father’s long-gone mother documented his every childhood phase. Flipping though the photo album I see him posed in his christening gown, a page later in his velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, then bundled in funny little coat and ready to go outside, then I flip the page and there he is with old Nell, the harness horse that pulled his grandfather’s buggy. In all these posed photos he was with his usually identically dressed fraternal twin brother.

But my mother? Fugedaboudit. I never saw a picture of her as a child. The earliest photo of her must be around age 22 or 23, and even then it’s just a snapshot from a distance far enough to have to look close to see it’s her. Of the few photos I have of her before age 45, none show a clear view of her face. This one, of her and my older brother as a baby, is typical:

I don’t care how good your photo editing software is, you’re not going to find my mother’s face in there. Which is why my heart skipped a beat when I peered into a tiny two inch by three inch photo of my aunt and her toddler boy and there, in the shadowed background, was a figure that might have been my mother. Might have been. As in, I felt a glimmer of hope. Aunt Ola is front and center in the photo. She’s in the yard of her parents’ Shenandoah, Virginia house, all smiles and looking modern in her short skirt, flapper cloche and baby Ray in her arms. He’s wearing his jumper with the big buttons and white shirt, high socks, and his Buster Browns. There’s a Model something-or-other Ford in the driveway behind them. I’ve had the photo for years but never stopped to examine it because, well, it was Aunt Ola, not my mom, and that figure in the background was too faint to see much of. This is what the photo looked like to me. Like I have glaucoma:

No, the borders aren’t really that dark, but this is exactly how the photo felt every time I glanced through the album. Then a few weeks ago I decided to restore some of our old photos and get copies to other family members. I brought out the album for the first time in quite a few years and looked at the pictures with the idea that the newest restoring and retouching programs could correct some of their problems. I took another look at the photo of Aunt Ola and baby Ray.

Could that be my mother? I had to move the lamp to spotlight the photo. I rested the heavy-handled and usually only decorative magnifying glass onto the edge of my keyboard, and practically stopped breathing to get an unblurred view. But yes, I was certain, that is my mother! I imagined she had just been out playing in the summer fields somewhere, maybe playing hide and seek with her Cardin cousins down at the corner. More likely she was with her mother in the garden. Unlike her sisters, she liked be out there digging holes with a hoe while her mother came along behind planting beans or peas. Or going along the bean rows with a stick in her right hand to knock worms off the leaves, dropping them into the pan she carried in her left hand.

Sometimes she climbed up into the big green gauge plum tree while her mother worked below. It was cool amid the leaves, and she liked to eat plums and watch her brothers out in the fields. Or sometimes she went in the kitchen and brought out the salt shaker, then poked around for the biggest, reddest, juiciest tomato, licking its silky skin so the salt would stick, then biting into its warm flesh till juice spilled down her chin and onto the front of her dress. No mind. Gardening is dirty work, and that’s what old clothes are for.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t being the star of any photograph. She may have looked up from whatever she was doing and seen Ola, her autocratic oldest sister, looking like the center of attention with her baby boy and having her photo taken by her husband, Raymond. Mom probably thought, oh no you don’t, it’s not just you and Ray and Raymond. I’m here too.” So she skipped up to the porch in her little black slippers, leaned over the rail, and smiled for the camera.

I sent the photo to an expert photo restoration artist and asked her to give it all she’s got. A day later she emailed me back this:

The thick brunette hair and something about that barely-visible face told me this might be the one and only photo that exists of my mother as a child, this half-lit figure peering over the porch railing, crowding into a photo that isn’t supposed to be of her. She looks about nine or ten. The camera is oblivious of her, but she’s smiling for the photographer like the beauty queen she would later be. I’d recognize that alabaster skin anywhere. Her mother made her carry a sun parasol whenever she was out in the sun. And her gorgeous hair. She wore it shoulder length into her early 50s, and it always fell across her forehead in cascades of soft waves. She told me about those slippers too. Her father bought them for her before a church recital, and she loved the dainty little things. So different from the lace-up boots with thick stockings that she wore all winter. I don’t know anything about that old dress, except that the last duty for any bit of clothing, before being torn up for rags and rag rugs, was for wearing to do work like cleaning and gardening.

This is the one picture to the thousands of words in the stories my mother has told me. The tomatoes and the plums and the bossy sister and the pretty slippers and the seed sack dresses and happy summers. It gives evidence to more than the stories too: To my experience of her smile and her soft hair and her impish humor. I am now the proud owner of exactly one photograph of my mother’s childhood. But that’s all I need, just the one.

Happy Not Anniversary

Posted on March 4, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

Today is not my wedding anniversary. But my husband and I celebrate the date every year. This morning he gave me a big hug and said, “Do you know what today is?” I thought for a second and said, “Oh, it’s our Not Anniversary.” Later tonight we’ll have a nice dinner and laugh about the events of 31 years ago. We had been engaged for about a year but hadn’t gotten around to getting married. He was more of a traditionalist than I, so asked me sweetly if I would care to finally settle on a date, please. I gave it some serious thought and came up with March 4^th. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that there was no more appropriate date in that or any year than March 4^th. The date itself would add a layer of significance to our marriage. It would be as symbolic as the vows, the ring, the wedding cake, and the two-foot tall candle I bought to burn on each anniversary for the next 50 years.

He and I have both made our livings as writers during various times of our lives. We can’t go into a restaurant without proofreading the menu. We rewrite actors’ lines in the TV shows we watch. We read book passages out loud to each other if they’re particularly well written. We love words, and we love when they are used in ways that imbue them with layers of meaning. Like the name of this blog: We’re All Relative. At its most basic the blog is about my family’s genealogy. I am telling our stories to the family’s future generations so they don’t have to wonder who they are or where they came from. Peel off that layer and you’ll see a second theme, rather the opposite of the first, that the end game of genealogy is ultimately an exercise in meaningless. Because the farther back you go the more ancestors you have, until you ultimately have a connection to everyone. And therefore no one.

My fifth great-grandfather was Sir John Boyd, who left the comfort of his peerage position in Scotland in 1736 to ply the seas and take up life on the wild frontier of Pennsylvania. Good enough. But I wonder what my other 253 great-great-great-great-great grandparents were doing in 1736. Am I really up to finding out? And what about their parents, and their grandparents? Because they’re all my ancestors too, all 1,024 of them. And this is where the numbers really start adding up. Go back three more generations and you have 15,382 direct ancestors of the grand-parental variety to sort out. Add four more generations, putting you roughly back to 1450, and you have more than a quarter million grandparents of various great- and great-greatness. Add in just one sibling per grandparent and you’re over one million grandparents and first cousins. They all have stories. But I’m not digging them up.

Okay, we’ve peeled off that layer of meaning to We’re All Relative. The next, and last I’ve thought of so far, is about our own meaning in this world. Who we are is relative to place, time, and circumstance. That we are alive today, our ancestors – all billions of them – had to pick the spouses they did, cross the seas when they did, survive the plagues of disease that they did and outrun the wild animals that they did. Robert Boyd was one of three children of my before-mentioned fifth great-grandfather John Boyd, who were killed in an attack on their home by hostile Native Americans. My ancestor was not home at the time, and thus I was born. The fact that I exist is predicated on billions and billions of individual circumstances, decisions, and fates that came before and still occur every day. Which makes me think I could have named my blog, We’re All Irrelevant, or We’re All Impermanent, So Watch Yourself. I think I’ll stick with the top layer. I just like it that I can dive into deeper waters if I have a hankering.

March 4^th carries a much less existential symbolism. It is a date with semantic meaning. To be married is to march forth into a shared life. It is to face the trials and share the joys of life side by side, always side by side. It is a commitment to the future, to shared goals and dreams and spontaneous diversions. I’m not one to ever want to march anywhere, but to march forth is in keeping with the formality of a traditional wedding. After our march together down the aisle and then back up the aisle, we fairly ran everywhere else. Sometimes with direction, sometimes not. Sometimes together, sometimes not, but always verging back to our shared place.

But we didn’t do it on March 4^th. No. After being excited about the date and planning the time and place for the wedding and making all kinds of preliminary plans, he came home from work one day and informed me that he had to shoot a commercial on March 4^th. It Had Been Decided. The client, the agency, the talent, the production team, even the damn helicopter had been put in motion toward a March 4^th date. It was written in pen, while my wedding had only been penciled in. That was the rationale.

We ended up not getting married for another year. There was no urgency pushing us toward a specific date, so we let life carry us along until one or the other – I forget which – decided it was time to pen in a date. We had a lovely wedding on some date, either May 2^nd or 4^th or 5th, and proceeded to forget which actual day it was every year thereafter. We used to rely on my mother-in-law to settle the date question every year. She’s gone now, but my sister has a pretty reliable memory and a rock-solid reliable planner. I couldn’t tell you even now what day we got married. I only know it was early May and it wasn’t March 4^th. I’ll probably call my sister on the first or second of May to get it straight. Sometimes we forget entirely, or remember sometime around mid-May. But we never, ever forget our Not Anniversary on March 4^th.

Happy Not Anniversary, dearest husband.

Born to Run

Posted on February 20, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

I have lots of photos of my father’s mother. Portraits of her as a child. Portraits of her as a young woman. Portraits of her with her twin babies. Then snapshots of her with family, with friends over the years. A full chronology of my grandmother’s life.

But I can count the photos of my grandfather on one hand and still have a finger left over. He wasn’t camera shy. He just didn’t stop for the camera. In the first photo he is a boy of ten. It’s 1890 and he is with his family before their very large Ohio farmhouse (I count nine windows and four doors on just the two sides I can see). It looks to be late winter and this yard is no doubt beautiful in summer with its overhang of leafy trees and long views, but here it is a mess of mud and melting snow, a hazard for the ruffled skirts and high heel boots of his sisters. Grandaddy is in knee-high leather boots and holding the harnesses of two yearling calves, an odd prop for a family photo, and amusing given the formality of the other family members. He looks like he was just passing through and the photo’s subjects stepped aside to make way for him, he stopping for a moment before moving on. He was always headstrong, so more likely he insisted on including two calves he was raising himself. The next photo is a good 20 years later. My grandparents lived in a big two-story Colonial on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. Granddaddy commuted across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan each day. In the photo his suit coat is off and tie is loosened. He is holding his baby boy in the air, gazing at him as if in sheer wonder. Or perhaps sheer fear, because these new twin boys were conceived bittersweetly three years after my grandparents’ darling daughters, one six and one six months, died of then-incurable disease, my grandmother deciding she would never again have children. Her own father had to intervene to persuade her that she could love other children, but that’s another story for another time. Granddaddy waited patiently, as was really his only choice, and now I have this photo of him cautiously holding this precious bundle of baby that was my father. Or uncle. I can’t tell.Sometime during their Woodcliff Lake period he decided to invent a better kind of running shoe. He had been a track star at Oberlin College and held the “Big Six” record for the fastest two mile. Only fragments of the running shoe story remain. The soles were made from tires, or tire rubber. To prove their superiority he ran in them from Woodcliff Lake to Passaic (20 miles) or Lima, Ohio (625 miles), I forget which. That’s all I know. There is no photo commemorating his accomplishment. In fact, I have no other photo of him until about 40 years later.

In that photo he is an elder in his 80s, standing next to his brother and behind my grandmother who finally, after a life more nomadic and in all ways unsettled than she ever wanted, was sitting in the lap of luxury at her Leucadia, California home, the gleaming Pacific to one side and an endless panorama of rolling hills to the other. Granddaddy lived in that lap of luxury too, but it was luxury he did not want and did not take to with ease. The febility of old age frustrated his need to put one foot in front of the other toward some fanciful goal.

As a boy Granddaddy was a prodigy. I have it on numerous family authorities that he flew through high school in one year and graduated from Oberlin College in two years. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin and Portuguese. As a recent graduate he accepted a one-year position to teach school in the Philippine Islands, where he became fluent in Tagalog. On coming back he went to work for a Wall Street Bank as an interpreter. A few years later he moved his family onto a commune called The School of Living in Suffern, New York, founded by the noted utopian, Ralph Borsodi. After a few years of that he scouted the Land of California, writing home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” That impressed the family, and as soon as my dad was home from WWII, off they went.

They weren’t following history, though. California’s greatest population booms followed the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1930s thousands of Americans, left destitute by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, went west in search of work. By that time my grandfather’s brother, Waldo Berryman was already moving his growing auto aftermarket company from Ohio to Palo Alto. He eventually moved it to Encinitas, California, though I don’t know if that was before or after my branch of the family moved there.

After WWII thousands more Americans moved to California after GIs had passed through there on their way to the Pacific Theater. They came home, grabbed their wives or sweethearts, and headed for the promised land of sunshine and opportunity. By the time my father was home from war the family’s bags were packed, furniture all shipped, and car gassed up and ready to head west and join Granddaddy in the Berryman family’s new-found home upon that “magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the last photo I have of my Grandaddy he is an old man walking, stooped and gnarled by Parkinson’s, but still, as he always was, moving forward and deep in thought.

I recently went hunting for photos of him online. Surely, with all he had done, there were photos of him in some college yearbook, newspaper, or historical archive. I know he was a track star in college, so I Googled “Robert Fulton Berryman” and “two mile,” his specialty.

Nothing.

I tried the search again with “R. F. Berryman” and bingo, I landed on the Oberlin College yearbook of 1905. (Thank you www.archive.org – you always come through!) I found the yearbook photo of the Oberlin track team. But…argh! The team members were not named in order of the photo. There was no, “Named, left to right.” In fact, there were more young men in the photo than names to the side. This wasn’t going to be easy. After studying each face, looking for my grandfather’s unmistakable upside-down pear shaped head, I settled on just one possibility. He had to be the confident looking young man sitting in the bottom row, second from right. Technically he’s seated in the second row, I suppose, but also technically his is the second head from bottom right.

I still don’t know for sure if this is Robert Fulton Berryman, Oberlin Class of 1905. But I’m going to believe it is. Because he was almost certainly in the track team photo and no one else is a close match. Because the head shape, ears, and eyes match the photo I have from 1960. And because the only photos I have of this man I loved so dearly are blurred, dark, or from his back or side.

I take this from these few scattered facts or semi-facts: Robert Fulton Berryman always ran towards, never from. The whole world was that magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude. He raced through college and then ran (not literally, I must point out) to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Spanish American War. He got an inheritance and so ran to Oklahoma to start a sheep ranch (fine occupation for an academic prodigy!). He ran from Wall Street to a commune, and from there to California. Whether he got comfortable in California and so decided not to explore further lands I don’t know. I do know that as I age, changing my life gets harder. I would like to move someplace completely different than coastal Southern California, but so many ties tether me here. After a while in one place it gets like that. But that’s another story for another time.

Grandaddy didn’t have time for cameras. But he had time for me. No camera can capture that.

John Fitch, Chapter 2: Victory…or Die?

Posted on February 18, 2014 by admin

John Fitch, 35-ish.GIF When we last saw my distant ancestor John Fitch he had just buried his gold and silver on Charles Garrison’s farm in the dead of night.

To catch you up, it was December, 1776, and General Washington’s army was staggering through Trenton in full retreat, with Cornwallis fast on their heels.

Fitch and his apprentices were making guns as fast as they could, but with one eye watching for the fierce and now fast-approaching Hessians, German mercenary soldiers of the British army.

Fitch worked until the Hessians were practically on him, then took what he could carry and fled.

No sooner was he gone before his factory was set fire, all his equipment destroyed.

All he had left were some small silversmithing tools and the gold and silver he grabbed quickly and carried, hidden, when he fled.

He buried his precious metals under a chestnut tree by the light of a dim lantern on Garrison’s Pennsylvania farm.

He carefully smoothed the spot, and mentally marked its precise location for when he returned, knowing it could be months, maybe even a year or more.

Then Fitch was alone once again.

It was a pattern that repeated itself over and over throughout his life.

He could not make and maintain deep connections with either people or places. Of course, I would run too with the Hessian army chasing me.

But most of the time it was only John Fitch’s dark thoughts that chased him, both from love and ultimate success.

The same dark thoughts that drove him to think of suicide countless times throughout his life.

Yet it’s early. He’s only 33. His greatest achievements – and greatest failures – still lay ahead.

At 33 he has already been one of the most accomplished silversmiths in America, and State armorer to New Jersey, building a factory and employing 60 gunsmiths.

But right now he’s lost.

The treasure that John buried made him a comfortably upper middle class man and gave him some sense of security as he stood in the field wondering which way to turn, what to do next.

He knew that when the war had passed through and he could safely reopen his silver and gun businesses, he had the money to buy the best equipment and set up in the best location.

What to do now was the problem.

While Fitch was escaping Trenton into Pennsylvania, General George Washington was heading the opposite way – crossing the Delaware to defeat the British at Trenton.

The war was young. The shot heard round the world was at Lexington just 14 months earlier, and the British had been chasing General Washington ever since, first all across New Jersey, and now across the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania.

Morale was low, desertions high.

It was December 23, 1776. Thomas Paine was with the troops, and saw the toll their defeats had taken. He sat down and scribbled an impassioned essay.

Washington had it read to his troops: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Washington rallied his troops. They mustered, Washington shouted his battle cry, “Victory or die!” and the Continental Army crossed the icy Delaware back into New Jersey and defeated the surprised Hessians. It was a turning point for the war, and now Washington could turn his army toward Morristown New Jersey and their winter headquarters.

This gave James Fitch an idea. He went to Baltimore and proceeded to fill two wagons with tobacco and dry goods, then drove them to the army’s camp at Morristown. After finding he had competition in those products he turned to something the soldiers were not getting enough of: beer.

He set out again, this time buying all the beer one local brewery could brew. When that wasn’t enough, he found other breweries, and was keeping a constant flow of brew to the troops, his wagons going back and forth from brewery to camp as fast as they could.

Fitch made an average of $100 pounds a week, an incredibly good payback. In all, he made $40,000, an enormous fortune.

The only problem was that he was paid in Continental money, not British pounds, and certainly not in gold or silver.

He knew inflation was high, but he didn’t know it was so high that by 1781 the continental would be worth only two and a half percent of its face value. And eventually, Congress would redeem the continental for just one hundredth of its original value.
By the time Fitch closed up shop on his beer deliveries, his $40,000 was worth only $1,000.

Fitch lost his money without the pleasure of buying or gambling it away.
All he had left was the buried treasure on Garrison’s farm, so he set out to go see his old friend, Garrison.

And that’s where it gets really interesting!

Stay tuned….

Ladies Who Lunch: Costume Edition

Posted on February 18, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

Nine kindly little ladies on a lovely outing.

That’s what I thought. Nine friends on a festive picnic, away from family duties for a few short hours of girlish giggles and shared secrets. They hiked their dresses and pulled each other up the sandy bluff like a chain of pink roses, never minding their scuffed shoes and wrinkled skirts because those are a small price to pay for the rare bliss of unencumbered time with old friends.

I’m sure some of that is true in spirit if not in fact. But look once more at the photo. What seems at glance to be a simple picnic turns far more curious at closer inspection. The photo was taken in Bainbridge, Ohio in 1920. But alert readers will note the ladies aren’t looking very 1920s, roaring or otherwise. Can these women be so fashion-challenged that they’re wearing 30-or-so year old styles? And who among them is the same size as she was 30 years ago? Even if they didn’t gain weight, some settling of contents does occur. Or are they so strapped to the old ways that they refused to change with the times? And why is the black-clad woman at far left brandishing a rolling pin?

Their clothes are some kind of mashup of Edwardian and late Victorian. The high collared shirts and bell-shaped skirts could be 1890s or 1900s, though the length tells me 1890s. The puffy sleeves are definitely 1890s. I don’t know what era the rolling pin or picnic baskets are from; they aren’t much different from ones I have. The cook’s apron, though, is definitely 1920s. I know at least one of these women is college-educated and a member of a prominent local family. The pretty little lady with the picnic basket, third from right, is Clara Brown Eggleston, my great-great grandmother. She was the wife of a distinguished doctor of both medicine and theology, who himself was the son of a college educated clergyman and businessman who lived in one of Chagrin Falls’ largest mansions. They were down-to-earth Emersonians and G-Grandmother Eggleston at least was far from pretentious. She spent a good deal of her time filling her basket with food and delivering it to the needy. But why would she do it dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, as she seems to be here?

I want answers! But lacking any, I sent the photo to fashion history expert Pauline Thomas, who believes the women are dressed in simple costumes of earlier eras for some sort of fair or anniversary event. That’s what I kind of figured. Since all their get-ups can be generally classed as Victorian or Edwardian, and the photo was taken in 1920, I can only surmise that they’re either on a costume picnic or cast members of a bring-your-own costume play. G-g’ma Eggleston does look like an elderly Red Riding Hood. And the black-clad school marm at left looks like she’s about to beat the dickens out of whatever miscreant is behind the camera.

I’ll never know what they were up to that day, but it’s comforting to see my g-g’ma looked like a sweet and kind lady, ready with brimming basket to dusty her shoes and skirt walking Bainbridge’s still-dirt side roads to share her blessed bounty with those in need of her – and her food’s – nourishment.

As for the costume picnic vs. play – I’m loving the idea of a costume picnic. Anyone want to join me?

John Fitch, Chapter 1: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!

Posted on February 16, 2014 by admin

John Fitch and I are second cousins eight times removed. That means my ninth great grandfather was his second great-grandfather, and my eighth great grandfather was his great-granduncle.

It’s nothing I’d get too excited over. Except that I wouldn’t know about him if I didn’t have this connection, and you wouldn’t be reading about his major-motion-picture life of an itinerant button maker.

I’m thinking Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Am I right?

I’ll give you a 30-second preview of the movie in my head.

(To be read aloud in your finest action movie trailer voice):

“As a mapmaker, his surveys helped open the Western Reserve territories… As a silversmith, he was renowned as the finest in the land… As a button-maker, he built a fortune… And as a land investor, he was captured in Kentucky Territory by hostile Natives…

“And that’s only the beginning… Fitch was traded to the French. He was confined to a prison island, and made another fortune. Bound on a prison ship, he narrowly escaped being sunk in sea battle by his own American comrades. Set free in New York, he set out for Kentucky to do it all again… And then…he invented the steamboat.”

Researching your genealogy isn’t just about dates, places, and begats. It’s history. And a way to learn history. When I saw the loooooong line of Fitches that stretch out behind me for many hundreds of years, I wanted to know more about this family and the history it wound itself through. It happens that there’s more out there on Fitches than for your average fairly anonymous ancestor.

One of the things I dug up was a little (as in diminutive) 413-page book about James Fitch, published in 1857.

The book is The Life of John Fitch, Inventor of the Steamboat, by Thompson Westcott. You can get it free at www.archives.org.

Author Westcott treads the victim theme pretty heavily, from Fitch’s reprobate family (How could he rise from this?!) to the many times he was slighted, cheated, lied to, given empty promises, and otherwise played the patsy. But I didn’t see it. I mean, how do you take a man who builds part of his fortune on supplying beer and tobacco to troops in the field and call him anything but an opportunist? And opportunists sometimes get their hands slapped.

Be that as it may, Fitch was brilliant and industrious, and knew how to turn a circumstance to his advantage.

When he was born in 1743 there were just under one million Colonists in America. By 1760 that number had swelled by three quarters, to a million and a half, and they were revving themselves up for a Revolution.

That’s the world John Fitch was born into. Roiling, uncertain, full of promise and knee-deep in opportunity, but as changeable as a fire wind.

With no guidance from people who loved him, John had to find his own place in the world. And because he was full of ambition but short on patience, he took a few ground balls to the chin along the way.

Fresh out of his father’s home, Fitch endured an unsuccessful apprenticeship with a clockmaker who wouldn’t teach young John how to make clocks, so after fulfilling the duties of his three-year indenture he was tossed to the world with scant skills at age 21, which was considered somewhat of a late start.

By grit and determination he found himself a position making buttons for a lazy silversmith, and before long he had bought out the man’s equipment, which he financed by making brass buttons and selling them town to town, traveling by foot.

His reputation grew and he somehow finagled himself the commission of armorer to the Revolutionary Army, providing arms and ammunition to the ill-equipped recruits who flooded in from small towns and woodland settlements to fight the bloody British.

He set up a small factory to build guns, but continued to supplement his income by making and selling buttons town to town.

By this time he was worth the healthy sum of 800 pounds. But with British forces ever on the move forward, and his racing around from town to town hauling buttons, he worried about his money.

After considering the alternatives, he decided to secretly bury it on his friend Charles Garrison’s place in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania.

And that’s when the story really gets interesting.

To be continued!

We're All Relative

Digging my own roots

Should I Display This Photo?

Like this:

The Only Photo of My Mother’s Childhood

Like this:

Happy Not Anniversary

Like this:

Born to Run

Like this:

John Fitch, Chapter 2: Victory…or Die?

Like this:

Ladies Who Lunch: Costume Edition

Like this:

John Fitch, Chapter 1: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: