Waaaaaa! Waaaaaa! Did you hear that? It’s the sound of my blog being born. My feisty baby has finally taken its first breath, made its first coo, looked me lovingly in the eyes as if to say, “thank you, mom”.
And look at you! There you are beside me telling me what a good job I’ve done, what a beautiful thing we now share between us. Maybe it’s the anesthesia but I swear I’ve never felt so close to you.
Babies are the beginning, not least where genealogy is concerned. They start the family tree and keep it growing. I have chosen these baby photos for my first post because, as tintype photos, they may be some of the oldest records I have of our family.
The only trouble is that, since no one could scrawl any identification on the back of the metal plate (and since no one chose the “Baby Elvira III” hoodie for the shoot) I am somewhat at a loss as to whom we are looking at. I suspect that these may be my grandmother’s brother, Ferris Dunning and her sister, Clara Dunning for a couple reasons.
First, the technology of the tintype photograph became popular in the 1860s and lasted through 1900 or so, according to this article.
Clara and Ferris were born in the early 1900’s but the two babies look like siblings and, given that the dress and the chair they’re sitting on look the same, it would be fair to assume that they had the pictures done at the same time. More convincing, the baby below looks just like later pictures that my grandmother has clearly marked “Clara Dunning”.
These babies passed away long ago yet here they are – present – starting out at us. It’s not hard to imagine a great-grandmother picking them up in her arms to hurry them off to the photographer. She would have had to shimmy that white dress over their heads, prop them on the chair, and say “no cheese!”
If we look at these photos now and imagine that scene, don’t they come back to life in some way? Isn’t that why we continue to share stories of loved ones who have passed – so that they can be together with us again, even if just in memory?
Yesterday happened to be an unseasonably warm day in New York. Our family ventured outside for what seemed to be the first time in ages. We collected all the fallen branches and started the hard work of clearing off the gardens.
What good therapy it is to rake dead leaves off a spring garden showing the first signs of life. Every knobby green tip you “rescue” from under the mulch makes you feel like a plant hero. Yes! It’s a thrill to uncover something hidden, and even better if the uncovering allows it to grow and bloom.
Tucked in an album under my bed, the ancestors were as “dead” as could be. By taking them out and trying to retell the story (however imperfectly), I’m trying to let them breathe again. Or wear that uncomfortable bonnet and jacket get-up one more time, as the case may be. I can’t tell how at this point, but I have faith that ‘tending the family garden’ will bring some kind of new life to us.