Finding more family treasures every day. Here’s my dad in a tree on Euclid Heights Blvd. Cleveland Heights, OH. August 1931. Five months later, he’d lose his father to cancer. My dad is now 90 years old and would love that a photo from his childhood is being shared and enjoyed by people around the […]
This photograph is of my grandmother, Margaret (Kelly) Birkenbach, second from the right. She was born in southern Ohio in 1904. Judging from her age, this photograph was most likely taken in 1915 or 1916, when she would have been 11 or 12 years old and her sister, Katie Ruth Kelly, on the far left, […]
Mom graduated from Lincoln High School in Sioux Falls, SD in 1975. At the time she thought she’d major in interior design. She ended up in child development and worked for a long time as the Director of Child Life at Children’s Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s where my sister and I were born. Mom […]
This photo was taken around 1937 in Beirut. My mum, Celia, is torturing her big brother, Peter, with my grandmother, Elsie, looking on and sister, Alison, on the left. I love the way this captures a spontaneous, silly kids moment. My mother’s British/American family lived in Lebanon for three generations. My Quaker missionary great-grandparents, their […]
This photograph of my grandparents makes my heart flutter. They were not supposed to fall in love; my grandmama was disowned from her family for abandoning her pre-arranged groom-to be. She lost everything to come to a country where everyone hated her and the way she looked. But instead of being bitter, she taught my […]
Sometimes the best trip is the one down memory lane. My grandmother Gladys (center, in red trousers) plays shuffleboard on board a ship to Canada to visit cousins. The photo shows her having fun and playing games, which she always enjoyed. She was a great card player too. The photo is from the treasure trove […]
There’s nothing like the look of love in a father’s eyes. I almost overlooked this photo because I focused on the fact that my twin brother and I were blurred and is over exposed. Yet there’s something so captivating about the way my father’s eyes sparkle when looking at us. It’s almost like my father […]
Today is my mom’s 85th birthday. Here she is, little Dolores Irwin, on her way to St. Mary’s Star of Sea church for her first communion in 1938 in Baltimore, Maryland. She is telling me right now at her kitchen table that this was in her great-aunt Minnie’s yard. It backed up to her grandmother’s […]
Meet my paternal great-grandfather Jesse, a red-headed blue-eyed guy of (mostly) Scottish extraction. Here, he’s sitting with his grandsons. When Jesse married his wife in a Virginia/North Carolina border town, they decided to move up North to Jersey for a better life because they were a mixed-race couple. Once settled, Jesse got a job in […]
My mom was a single mom and I am her only child, so it was pretty much me and her and a bunch of her friends hanging out a lot when I was a kid. Like at this festival…she always said I was very portable. I was her little person! This is one of my […]
Recent Comments