If you follow my social media, you've seen all the pictures I posted from my youth as well as a bunch from my parents' and grandparents' youths. But you can only go so far back before you see pictures of people they knew well but you have no idea who they are. Of my relatives, the farthest back I can go is my grandparents on both sides. Their parents were long dead before I showed up except for Grandma's mom, who died a couple of months before I was born. So here are a couple of pictures I found. I know Gramps, Grandma, Mom and my Aunt Sue, but the others? I had to wonder who they were.
I puzzled over it until I came to the realization that I am very stupid. Why am I stupid? Because there is one person these pictures who is still alive: my Aunt Sue. So I sent them to her to see if she could remember.
And she remembered very well. In the first picture we have my great-grandmother on the left. I kind of thought it might be Gramps's mom because I saw older pictures of her, and she looked like a woman version of Gramps near the end of his life. Gramps is next to her followed by my great-grand uncle Theo, who I'd heard about quite a bit when I was a kid. I just didn't know what he looked like. At the end is my great-grandfather, Gramps's dad. The little girl at the bottom is my Aunt Sue, and she even remembered about her favorite teddy bear.
Knowing that, you can figure out the next picture. To the right of my great-grandmother is Mom, and there's Aunt Sue in Grandma's lap.
Longtime readers know I'm a firm believer in the idea that history is never as far behind you as you think, but sometimes it is. Maybe a lot farther. I do these columns not just to entertain the rest of you (although I certainly try to do that), but mostly as a journal of my life so if I find myself getting forgetful in my old age, I can read these and remember. And it'll be good to know some of the generation before the generation I met and knew.
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