family portrait

Nice. I wish we had images like that from my family.

Oh wow, I have a family photo from a similar era of my Great Grandparents and their children, one of which is my dad's father. Where was this part of your family living at this time? Ours was in Germany and the clothing appears different overall. Gotta love these old vintage photos of family......thanks for sharing.

Trail Images said:

Oh wow, I have a family photo from a similar era of my Great Grandparents and their children, one of which is my dad's father. Where was this part of your family living at this time? Ours was in Germany and the clothing appears different overall. Gotta love these old vintage photos of family......thanks for sharing.

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This is my maternal grandmother's family. They had a large farm near Bruce, SD - notice my great-grandfather's huge hands. He probably wore this suit only on Sunday. A stamp on the back says the photo was taken at a studio in Brookings, SD. The faces of several of my siblings and cousins are in this picture, all descended from the women. There was one more girl born after this photo. I only ever met one of the men. The dark-eyed girl sitting front-center drove a Plymouth Barracuda into her 80s.

The baby is Beulah. She and her husband retired to Florida and would visit us for weeks at a time in the summer with their Airstream trailer. I am the youngest and my 3 older sisters practically worshipped her. She and her husband were two of the most wonderful people on earth. He was a genius who invented a refrigeration scheme that he sold to become the basis for a very large American appliance manufacturer, I don't remember which one. He was the high jump champion at the 1919 Allied Games. She would talk nonstop. She might be knitting and you could leave the room in the midst of a story, come back 10 minutes later and she wouldn't even know you left.

I only ever knew my grandmother as a care-worn, beat down, wrinkled old woman. Her wedding picture is one of an almost painfully beautiful young woman, long before the Great Depression took her husband's implement dealership, pneumonia took her first born son, and alcoholism the second.

These photos are so valuable, and so wonderful. We have several albums and mounted photos of our past family and treasure them dearly. Glad you have this.

I liked reading your follow up comments here. Sounds like you've retained a bit of the family history overall. Sadly, I see our family losing all of our personal comments on background history with the last remaining few of us when we pass on.

I just looked it up and my grandmother was born in 1885, so I would put this photo at 1900 or earlier. She was married at 21 years of age in 1906. By the time I had any awareness, my grandfather was getting ready to die of cancer. He was supposedly quite a character, beat down by hardship but still full of laughter, but I never saw that. I have a photo of him around 1940 that I will look for. Life was hard and people in those days were so much tougher than we are.