The photo on the left reminds me of how quickly time passes. The little girl on Emma White's left with her hand on her mother's knee is my grandmother Lissie White Hammond. The photo on the right is the same image of Mama Hammond edited in Microsoft Photo Editor. What a beautiful little girl she was.
A few early memories of her are all that I have. She died in June of 1955 when I was not quite three. Fortunately, I have a very vivid memory of the last time I saw her. She was convalescing in the front room of the house on East Main St. and my father took me and my sister, Sherry, in to see her; A few days later, she was gone.
I say that to say this. I would pay any amount of money, give anything that I have, to have a collection of her memories, her recollections about her family and how they lived. That can never be realized. That memory, that recollection of experience is lost.
What can be realized, what can be left behind, are the recollections and memories that are still here. That is my vision for this site - that over time more and more family members will come here to leave anecdotes and memories about our common ancestors.
Please share this site with others in the family.
How quickly time does pass . . .
ReplyDeleteThe original of this photo is a tin-type. The little girl on the left is Aunt Ella we think. Aunt Ella came to live with us after Puddleduck (what we all called my grandmother, Lethea) died in 1967. I was only six years old. Aunt Ella lived with us for almost ten years - until my mother could no longer take care of her health needs and therefore moved her into a nursing home. She was a member of our family, but she was more like a second mother to my brothers, sister and me. I have a vivid memory of the last time that I saw her as well. She was on her death bed in the old Cheraw Hospital. I was not yet 16 years old. We were all there during her last hours, but I could not handle being in the same room. I walked in to see her, got too upset and had to leave. Oh how I wish I had been in more control of my emotions, so I could have stayed and told her how much she meant to me.
I am so fortunate to have inherited her photograph and memorabilia collection as well as her love of our family history. I hope that I am doing justice by the collection with my care for it and sharing it with family members.
Aunt Ella was a remarkable woman. She gave up having a husband and family of her own in order to take care of her father and younger siblings after her mother, Emma died. She had this wonderful quiet strength about her . . .
she didn't have to raise her voice or threaten to spank you, but she let you know that she didn't put up with foolishness and you better behave and be respectful.
Some of my fondest memories of her are attending Pine Grove Baptist Church on hot, hot Sundays with all the rotating wall fans going and everyone fanning with those old time hand fans; cleaning ear after ear after ear of fresh corn in our backyard; eating her homemade hoecakes and cornbread and potato chips; and lying in her feather bed as she told Dennis and I of the days when my mother and her sisters were growing up.
I believe that is my grandfather, Thurman, that is standing on the left in the photo. I have no memories of him at all. He died before I was three years old. Oddly enough, probably my very first memory is of, I believe, when John F. Kennedy was assasinated. My grandmama Freeman would keep me a lot when I was a toddler and I remember her standing in front of her television sobbing and using her apron to wipe away her tears. I had just turned three in September of that year.
Somewhere I have a copy of this picture also. Using the timeline of the childrens' births, I came to the conclusion that on the back row from the left are Uncle Thurman, Uncle Boss, and Aunt Dollie Teal (Dorothy Anne). I know that Boss is the older by two years, but he was so much shorter than Thurman - and they would have been in their early teens when the growth spurt would have possibly already hit Thurman. I am guessing of course, but I think you are right.
ReplyDeleteThe birth timeline would indicate that Aunt Ella is on the left, Lissie is on the right at her mother's knee, and Uncle Fred is the baby in Emma's lap. Uncles John and Jack have not arrived. Fred was born in 1896.
Aunt Ella was a beautiful, sweet, woman. You were very lucky to have her as such an integral part of your household growing up. Growing up in Grandaddy Hammond's house gave me so much - such a window and a sense of an earlier generation that my parents alone could not have given me.
Here is another question I have. When you compare the two Eliza's - Eliza sitting between Grandaddy White and Uncle Ell with Eliza sitting beside Emma, the likeness is not that similar. Look at the noses in particular.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the older woman in the photo with the children is actually Dorothy Thurman Eddins, Emma's mother. Circumstantially, the absence of Henry is interesting, if the older woman is his mother, one would think he would be in the photo also.
Just an uneducated guess.
Over the years since I received my Aunt Ella's collection of photographs, I too have studied this particular tintype, in particular, in comparison with the portrait that Brother Davis brings every year to the White Family Reunion. I have often thought that possibly the portrait was created from this tintype.
ReplyDeleteI studied the tintype even more when I received the copies of two old photos from Sally White Greer from the collection of her father, John H. White. Helen White Feltham had originally told me about one of the photographs and that John H. had told her that it was a photograph of Thrashley White. I asked my mother to ask John H.'s daughters about the photograph when they visited with the family after John H.'s death.
That photograph is very interesting, but the copy of the additional photograph is even more interesting in that it lists the family members as Granddaddy's Brother Uncle Ell, Grandmother White and Granddaddy White. This lady sitting in this photograph copy is the one that I have compared with the elderly lady in the tintype and the portrait in possession of Brother Davis.
Then when only a couple of months ago I came across the oval photograph/portrait in the possession of the Jack Hammond collection and included in the computer database of Bud Hammond, I studied all the photographs again in comparison with this one that I had never seen before. At first I could not see the resemblance, but as I studied all the photographs more and more, I began to see a resemblance, in the hairline, the shape of the eyebrows, the shape of the eyes, the nose, the shape of the mouth, the earlobes, and in particular the shape of the lines on either side of the nose that run down to the outer corners of the mouth.
This is most definitely an uneducated study of all the photographs as well. I do not know as much as I should about period clothing and photographic techniques.
Now, as for the elderly lady sitting in the family group photograph, I do not believe this could be Dorothy or Dollie Thurman Eddins, mother of Emma Hudson Eddins White. I have a Kodak copy of Dorothy or Dollie Thurman Eddins standing alongside her husband, Andrew Jackson or Jack Eddins that Edgar Rivers gave to me many years ago. I am going to try to add it to this post. (I am not too good at this blog thing yet and cannot even remember how I added the possible photograph of Edgar Rivers.)
As for the absence of Henry Wiley White in the family photograph, I have often wondered about that myself. But, as it states in the "Our Rivers Family" compiled by Edgar's mother, Minnie Lee Sanders Rivers, Henry was a planter. So, more than likely he was out planting that day. You can see that behind the family group a sheet of some type was draped over what looks to me to be the side of a building or home. I am sure that with the original being a tintype that the photographer more than likely was traveling by their home and asked if they would like a family photograph taken. Wanting to have something like this in order to remember her children at that age, I am sure that Emma would not have turned this opportunity down. I have a similar family photograph of my grandmother, Puddleduck's, Smith family taken in the front yard of their home in the Shiloh Community.
One more tidbit about the tintype photograph. While I was living in the Matthews, NC area I took several of the oldest photographs from Aunt Ella's collection to a photograph copying specialist in Charlotte, NC. On this particular photograph she said that she could recreate some of the missing features using an artist brush. I asked to see one that she had recreated and decided against this. I think she might have been offended, but if she recreated one face she would have to do touchups on all the others to make it look the same and I certainly did not want a photograph copy with everyone's face retouched.
That is a great analysis. I sort of knew that you had taken a hard look at all of this. Sometimes I may ask a question designed to get information out and recorded on the site. Hope you don't mind.
ReplyDeleteI kind of had a feeling you did this and of course I do not mind. I have enjoyed it, your writings and your memories. You are very good at this and it is bringing back a lot of memories that I have not thought about in years. I have to admit that it could get me into a bit of trouble. I am sitting here writing when I need to be cleaning house, doing the laundry or cooking supper. But, please continue.
ReplyDeleteI remember looking at the tin-type when I was a boy and Aunt Ella lived with Uncle Thurman and Aunt Letha (or was it spelled Lethea?) She always said it was her grandmother White. Didn't she live with her son, Henry? I have a small copy of the picture the Brother Davis has of Grandmother Eliza White, and it looks almost as if it were taken from or at least the same time as the tin-type. The only differences that I can discern are that her right arm is clearly distinguishable and not hidden behind a child as in the larger photograph that Brother has, and it seems to me that she is looking more directly into the camera than in the tin-type. In both pictures she's wearing what appears to be the same pin -- maybe she didn't have but one. Could we get her image edited and enlarged like the picture of Aunt Lissie? That way we could make better comparisons. The buttons on her dress, which, by the way, appears to be made of some heavy material such as wool, stand out noticeably.
ReplyDeleteMy grandfather John White loved to head to the front porch at the first sign of an approaching summer thunderstorm, a trait that I inherited. His either going to the porch or refusing to come into the house would aggravate my grandmother, Minnie. Granddaddy White would say that his father was afraid of thunderstorms and that his grandmother White would say, "Put your trust in the Lord, Henry, put your trust in the Lord." Granddaddy would say that he trusted in the Lord, and Granny would counter with, "Yeah, but you don't have to tempt him by being out on the porch where you could get struck by a pop of lightning."
Some of my favorite memories of my grandparents and Uncle Thurman's houses on Scotch Road are of the front porches and all that took place on them. My grandparents all but moved to the front porch on summer evenings, often shelling beans or peas, and often about dark, my grandfather would say, "I think we ought to have a churn of ice cream. Minnie, go make it up and I'll go get some ice." Granddaddy's favorite kind was banana and it seems we had it 98% of the time. I'd beg for peach or strawberry, but banana usually won out. On Sundays, when there would be more family, Granddaddy would borrow Uncle Thurman's churn. It was a five-quart churn; Granddaddy's held only four quarts.
I'd love to go back, but only for a short time. I wouldn't trade air conditioning for all the ice cream that's ever been churned!