Sometimes less is more….

 

I wanted to share this with you, when it comes to editing vintage photos, it is not always necessary to do a lot of fixes. 

This is a photo of my husband’s grandfather who he never met…

Great photo, in great shape, just “muddy” color….

 

I opened it in my Windows Live Photo Gallery and adjusted the contrast, the shadows and a bit of highlights….I also cropped out the edges…

This is all this needs and it took about 45 seconds!  If you have Windows, look at using the Photo Gallery for editing photos that are not trashed.  For those you need Vertus or PSE.

 

Just an FYI….

Happy Halloween !!!!!

This is one of my grandmothers photos I treasure most!    She is the one sitting far right with her hand on the floor, the one in the middle in the light colored dress, looking straight ahead is her sister Jessie Reinhard and the one second from the left in the back is their other sister Mamie Reinhard.   I assume a bunch of friends from school are the rest of these lovely gals.  I love the dark pumpkins, wouldn’t you love to see this photo in color??????

 

 

Hope everyone has a wonderful fun Halloween!

And So It Is Told….

                 My great grandfather Jesse O Burgess

 

                                   The Chosen                      

 

We are the chosen.  In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors.  To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.  Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before.  We are the story tellers of our tribe.  All tribes have one.  We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story.  So, we do.  In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.  How many graves have I stood before and cried?  I have lost count.  Hoe many times have I told my ancestors, “You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us”. How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes beyond documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying – I can’t let this happen!  The bones are bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh.  It goes to doing something about it.  It goes to our pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish.  How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life fort heir family.  It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation.  It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so w love each one, as far back as we can reach.  That we might be born who we are.  So, as a scribe called,  I tell the story of my family.  It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore memory or greet those who we had never known before…

 

by Della M. Cummings Wright; rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson; edited and reworded by Ton Dunn, 1943."

A Long Time Ago….

My cousin was looking thru some old things of her mom’s and found this receipt from my great grand uncle.  He was a home decorator and contractor.  This is a receipt from a home he remolded in 1922…

Can you imagine????  Working for 85 cents an hour?????  Look at the phone number!  Work was hard then just like it is now.

My Aunt Goldie, the woman who kept this never threw anything away, and I am so thankful that she didn’t!  She also wanted future generations to know the connection and so she wrote this on the back;;;

Charles Reinhard was William’s brother and my great grandfather.  And she tried to put a little something like this on all of the items she kept.  Thank you Aunt Goldie, for thinking of all of us!

I am going to see if this family has descendants in Eau Claire or elsewhere so I can share it with them!

Happy New Year!  

A Victorian Christmas

 

I have no photos of my parents as children at Christmas, in fact I have no baby photos of my Mom at all….my grandparents were too poor to have any real photos of any of their children as babies.  It makes me sad as the maternal grandparents were very well off….but such is life.

My Dad’s Dad was a Barber…enough said about their income….but I do own a few of him as a baby, just not at the holidays.

This is a photo of Severin “Socky” Westlund at Christmas in 1915.  This was taken at my great grandparents hose.  They were Zachrias and Mary Severson.  Socky is just 7 years old…. I wish I could see more of these!

I just love the walls and that photo on the wall….wonder where that ended up?  His toys are behind him and he looks way too serious for a boy of 7. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to still have these great vintage toys?

I remember Socky very well and with a lot of  love, he was a wonderful, kind, soft spoken man with a great sense of humor!  I just wish I had been interested in the family before he passed….again, if you have family members that you can talk to…do it!!!!!  You only get that chance  for those wonderful stories and tidbits while they are with us…

Merry Christmas to all and to all a goodnight…as Santa would say…:)

 

Sandy

The Meaning of Memorial Day

I have always know that Memorial Day is a day to remember those who died during an American war, but I did some checking and found out how it started…..

The day was originally know as “Decoration Day” because the day was dedicated to the Civil War dead, when mourners would decorate the gravesites.

The holiday was first widely observed May 30, 1868, when 5000 people helped decorate the gravesites of 20,000 Union and Confederate solders buried at Arlington National Cemetery. After World War 1, the observance was widened to honor the fallen from all American wars- and in 1971 Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday.

Please try to remember the real meaning of this day when you are with your loved ones and take a moment this weekend to really be thankful to all those who have died for our way of life!

Images all courtesy of Google

Jessie Emilia Emma Reinhard

I would like to introduce you to a very special lady….Her name was “Aunt Jesse”, I only knew her as that as I was just a child….Aunt Jessie was my maternal grandmother’s sister.  There were three Reinhard sisters:

The baby in the middle is my grandmother Josephine ( born in 1891) , the child on the left is Mae Lillian “Mamie” and the oldest on the right is Jessie. 

The family story is that Jesse got Scarlet Fever as a child and her fever went too high and she came out of it mentally “different”.   She lived with her parents Charles and Amelia Reinhard her whole life, and when they both passed within 48 hours of each other she came to live at my grandparents house.  She never got past about 10 years of age….so to me a 8 or 9 year old she seemed perfectly normal!   She loved puzzles, she did hundreds of them and they were all in my grandparents attic. .  My grandmother was rough on her sometimes or so it seemed to me as a youngster,  and I would get cross at Grandma, I hated it when I thought she was being mean.  Now as an adult I understand what a sacrifice my grandparents made in taking her in, and how it was like having a forever child.

In the few photos I have of Jesse as a child, she has a somewhat different look on her face, but she was never excluded from anything! That was not the normal for mentally challenged children in the early 1900’s and I applaud my great grandparents for not putting her away, like so many children were that were afflicted mentally in some form or another in that time era.

Above photo, L to R, Jessie, Mamie and Josephine.

This wonderful photo is at a Halloween Party, Jessie is the beautiful women in the white right in the middle, The woman sitting down on the far right is my grandmother.

 

 

Jessie is in the far right.

 

The photo that means the most to me is this one……

This is how I remember my sweet Aunt Jessie….always with one of those very worn, very soft aprons on and that sweet smile…..

Jessie outlived both of my grandparents and ended up in a nursing home in Eau Claire, she lived to the ripe old age of 82.  Having very little of life’s stresses,  Jessie was able to outlive all of her family. I don’t know if that was a good thing or not, but it was how it happened.   As long as Jessie had her coloring books, crayons and puzzles her world was good…. I miss her a great deal some days…..