A family messenger chat today brought up some heritage connections, and my older sister, who took this photo, shared it.
The younger people in the photo are my mom, my brother, and myself. My sister is behind the camera. In the bed is my mother's father's father's mother, i.e. my great-great grandmother. This photo was taken on the one and only trip in which we met. She had been four years old when Abraham Lincoln was shot. She regaled us with stories of the black borders around the newspapers in her home state of Illinois following that event.
My sister brought up that her parents had been married in England and immigrated to the US with three children. This young lady was one of six children born to them on these shores.
She was 101 in this photo. I was not yet ten, which would make my brother not yet seven. The camera wielding sister was going on 12.
This was an amazing trip. One highlight for me was visiting a home that Abraham Lincoln's family had resided in at some point in his life (probably when he was a state senator?) and feeling the horsehair upholstery on one of the chairs. Impressed that they let us touch it!
Great great gram passed away the following April, shortly after her 102nd birthday.
My brother's daughter had started the chat with a question about whether the sister behind the camera and I had been alive when Kennedy was shot, and every time that sister and I think about Kennedy's assassination, we also think of Great-great-Grandma, who died just half a year before that event, and how we connected the historical dots with our own family tree.
Trying to get the story saved off before everybody who remembers it is gone, as of the four people in this photo, I'm the only one left breathing at this point (and the sister behind the camera, of course). Glad she re-shared it today.
Life is good. It is good to remember that history is made up of family stories, our own and others', and we're all just humans, trying to live our lives, raise our children, and hopefully help one another along the way.
