Photo Hunters: Family

I love looking at old photos. The people in them have such interesting faces. I like to think about what life was like for them back then, before electricity, running water, and computers! I’m sure life was very hard– lots of labor as evidently etched on their faces– but they had their wonderfully simple joys, too. I have an old cake tin filled with 90-year old birthday cards, baby announcements, and invitations to dinner. Those old papers once belonged to my great-grandmother and she had labeled them to be burned after her death in 1967. But my grandmother wouldn’t burn them; she saved them, and I got them after her death. I’m glad she saved them. They are a tiny window to the past, enabling me to see and understand the simple pleasures and pains of time gone by.

I caught the genealogy bug from my late grandmother. I’ve managed to research one of my parents all the way back to the 600s, to a Norse king. It is so neat to discover your own family history! I found out that my family tree includes Half-Dan the Old (a Viking king); a king of Jerusalem in the 900s; William the Conqueror; Eleanor of Aquitaine; a few kings of England; a Mayflower passenger; a Lexington, Massachusetts, Revolutionary War hero; a Civil War hero; and numerous pioneers.

I have a small collection of photos, too. It is so neat to look at one’s ancestors and see their features on the faces of one’s children! It is amazing!

Here’s a very old photo, dating to around the Civil War:

I wish I knew who these people were– they are ancestors but the photo is unlabeled. But the older woman looks strinkingly like my late grandmother! The gentleman also resembles Silas Fyler, a pioneer of Central New York (when it was uninhabited by white men). His family had come here from Connecticut, descended from the famous Walter Fyler of Windsor, Connecticut.

Here’s another one dating from that era. That tall girl is my great-great grandmother. Her great-great-great(etc) grandfather, a young teacher names George Soule, stepped off the Mayflower in 1620.
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