52 Ancestors 2022 Week 3 Favourite Photo

 52 Ancestors 2022 Week 3

Favourite Photo

 

I love these two photos, the only ones I have of my mother as a baby.  I particularly like the contrast between the formal pose of the five children and the very ragamuffin look of the snapshot.

 Mum looks less than a year old in the group photo, so it was taken in 1925.  Her oldest brother, Keith (b 1912), and oldest sister, Ruth (b 1915), are standing behind her.  Missing between them is their  brother, Jackie, who died when he was 6 years old,  in 1920.

 These two older siblings were too much older than Mum to be playmates and both were married while Mum was a young teenager.  Ruth’s marriage took her away from Quirindi, their home town, and Mum saw her again on only  a few occasions before her untimely death in 1945, although they wrote regular letters to each other. 

 Connie, born 1919, was five years older than Mum so she was a teenager while Mum was still a small child. She looks very serious in this photo, holding a spray of flowers in her lap and with her feet neatly crossed.   Mum recalled her dressing up for parties and balls and doing some of the dances of the time – the Charleston and the Black Bottom. 

 Nearest in age to Mum was Royce, born in 1921, and he sits on Mum’s left with a characteristic lop-sided grin and one leg tucked up – a surprisingly informal touch in such a formally posed picture.   

 It is Royce who is the older child in the other photo.  Until the arrival of Joan (b 1928), the last of the family, it was he who was Mum’s closest playmate. 

 This photo has a handwritten note from my grandmother on the back, which suggests that it was sent to Mum many years later. It says, “I am putting in this for you to keep of you and Royce of yourselves in gone days.  Mum” 

 It is always poignant to see the handwriting of someone who has been gone so long.

 Both the children are rugged up against the cold, although Royce wears short pants as little boys always did. 

 The car is interesting.  My grandfather had always had horses and carriages for his trips to town until the accident in 1924 which threw his wife and children into the creek and broke my pregnant grandmother’s hip.  It looks as if he had bought a car by 1926, when this photo was taken.  It’s a T model Ford -very popular at the time.