Photo Feature: Class of 1927

This week's mystery comes to us from Phoenix, Arizona, 1927.  We know this because the portraits are all from the Russell studio in Phoenix, and two of them (Loren Weddle's from last week's post, and Margaret Sobey's below) include the date. 

Albert Long Miller

This one stands out for me, because "Miller" is the only surname that I actually have in my files. My great-aunt Irene was a Miller - but I don't recall hearing about a sister or cousin named "Albert". (Irene was born in 1922, so a cousin would definitely be more likely.)

Margaret Sobey - 27

Gladys Jacobs Sendlewski

This is the kind of puzzle I find both fascinating and frustrating - because it seems like I'm missing just one crucial piece of information needed to figure it all out. Someone cared enough about these pictures to save them, and pass them on to my grandparents.

But, that's why I'm putting all of these "Who the Heck Are They" pictures online, where Google's Image search or a service like Tin Eye Reverse Image search can find them.  Who knows who might be looking for these people for their own family history?

As always, if you have any clues, dive into the comments below or drop me a private note.

The Nixon Connection

The first thing most people wonder when they start thinking about genealogy is, "Am I related to somebody famous?"

And for anyone who sticks with their research for any length of time, the answer is probably, "Yes!"

There are a lot of ways to be "related" to someone else - marriage, blood, adoption, or even business partnerships are all legitimate relationships that you can prove with documentary evidence, if you're just trying to show a connection. One of the most direct relationships - and the thing most people think they mean when they say they are related to someone - is to share a common ancestor. Sharing a common ancestor with someone is what makes you "cousins".

A few years back, I found a book called Ancestors of American Presidents by Gary Boyd Roberts, which showed that I share a common ancestry with the late former President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. He is my 5th cousin, twice removed. (Which, if it helps, means he and my grandmother were 5th cousins.) Whatever you may think of him as a president, or as a person, he certainly qualifies as "famous" - and since he was in office the year I was born, his story has some immediacy for me.

But for a lot of people, the whole "Nth cousin, X removed" concept is very hard to understand - I still struggle with it. So let's take a look at exactly how our ancestral paths diverged, starting with our common ancestors, Thomas Clemson and his wife, Elizabeth Strode. This couple would have been the President's 4th Great-Grandparents, and they are my 6th Great-Grandparents.

1. Thomas Clemson (1710-1785) and Elizabeth Strode (1725-1827)

Tettenhall and Dudley
(made with Google maps, 2014)

Thomas's parents were James Clemson and Katharine Wright of Staffordshire, England. Their families lived in Tettenhall and Dudley, respectively, which were villages about 8 miles apart near what is now Wolverhampton. They left England and came to join the Quaker community in Philadelphia around 1690.

Elizabeth's parents were both born in the Penn colony, in Chester county. Her maternal grandfather was one Morgan James from Wales, and her paternal grandfather, George Strode, arrived in the New World from Southampton in 1678, landing in Barbados before making his way north to settle in Pennsylvania.

Thomas and Elizabeth married in Salisbury township, Lancaster county, PA, in 1747. They had 10 children over the following 20 years - 3 sons, and 7 daughters. Two of those daughters were:

2. Sisters: Elizabeth Clemson (1759-1833) and Mary Clemson (1763-1817)

Elizabeth married an Irish immigrant named James Livingston in December 1782, and they had four sons and four daughters between 1782 and 1801. They relocated through the central part of Pennsylvania until sometime after 1810, when the family moved 550 miles west to Springboro, Ohio.

Mary married Joseph Moore in January 1782. He was the son of another Quaker family in Salisbury township, though his father had immigrated from Ballymoney, Ireland. Records indicate that Joseph moved to Morgan, Ohio, after Mary's death. The only child of their marriage that I know of is their son, Joseph Dickinson Moore.

Morgan is more than 150 miles from Springboro, so it is unlikely that any Moore children knew their first cousins, the Livingstons.

3. 1st Cousins: Mary Magdalene Livingston (1782-1847) and Joseph Dickinson Moore (1794-1860)

Mary was the eldest child of James and Elizabeth Livingston, born in Pennsylvania in January 1782. (If you're doing the math on that, you might sense a family scandal in the background.) Mary married a Scottish immigrant named Thomas Henderson Murray in May 1803 in Pennsylvania. They had 11 children over the next 20 years - 6 sons, 5 daughters. Those born before 1816 were born in Pennsylvania, and those born in 1818 or later were born in Ohio, where the family settled in Preble county.

Joseph was born in Center county, PA, in October 1794. At 24 years of age, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Since this was 1819, and there was no war on at the time, he might have enlisted to protect frontier families like his own as they expanded across the territory gained under the Treaty of 1818. He married Jane Brown in 1825 in Perry county, Ohio. Jane was the daughter of an Irish Presbyterian who immigrated from County Cork, served in the War of 1812, and settled in Perry county. The couple produced 6 sons and 5 daughters between 1826 and 1848, then relocated to Warren county, Iowa some time before Joseph's death in 1860.

4. 2nd Cousins: Aaron Murray (1822-1887) and Mary Louise Moore (1832-1918)

The youngest son of Thomas and Mary, Aaron Murray was born in Warren county, Ohio. He married Maria P. Harris in 1843, and they moved to Wabash county, Indiana, where Maria died in 1854. Widowed with two small boys, Aaron soon remarried in 1855 to Hannah Lyman Bender, whose first husband, Michael Eby, had died in 1850, leaving her pregnant and with two small boys. Aaron and Hannah had 5 children of their own over the following decade, during which Aaron served the Union during the Civil War with the 113th Regiment, Illinois Infantry. After the war they moved down to the newly founded town of Stark, Kansas.

Mary Louise Moore married Thomas Wiley Wadsworth (1826-1879), who was born in Harford county, Maryland. The Wadsworths likely descended from a Thomas Wadsworth who was born in 1713 in Middlesex, England, and was conveyed to the plantations of the Virginia colony in 1733 after being convicted of theft or larceny. After moving to Ohio and marrying Miss Mary Moore in 1850, this Thomas went on to raise four daughters and a son before his death in 1879. Mary remarried to George Amerine in 1886.

5. 3rd Cousins: Rosa Edith Murray (1861-1943) and Sarah Ann Wadsworth (1852-1886)

Rosa grew up in what would become the town of Grant, Kansas, and married Albert C Huff in 1883. Together they raised three sons and three daughters in Savonburg, Kansas, and then followed their children as they moved down to the newly settled desert town of Glendale in Arizona.

Sarah grew up in Hocking county, Ohio, and married Samuel Brady Nixon in April of 1873. The Nixon family had originated in Ireland, arriving in Delaware in the 1720s. Samuel's father, George, was a Union soldier from Ohio and was fatally wounded in the Battle at Gettysburg on 3 July 1863 - the same day that Samuel's grandfather, also named George died in his home in Richland, Ohio. Sarah and Samuel had a daughter and two sons when Sarah died at the early age of 33.

6. 4th Cousins: Hannah Merle Huff (1889-1984) and Francis Anthony Nixon (1878-1956)

Hannah Merle, whom everyone called Merle or "Merly", grew up in Savonburg, Kansas, and followed her brothers and sisters down to Glendale, Arizona, where she married Howard Ray Witter - who went by the nickname "Dick" - in March 1917. He got his draft card in June. After the war, Dick and Merle set up a dairy farm and raised two children, a son and a daughter.

Frank Nixon moved to California around 1900 after suffering from frostbite while working in an open streetcar in Columbus, Ohio. He worked as a farmhand, oil roustabout, and lemon farmer before he converted to Quakerism and married Hannah Milhous 25 June 1908. They lived in the Quaker community of Whittier, California, where the family business was a grocery store that also sold gasoline. They had five sons, two of whom died from tuberculosis - Arthur at 7 years old in 1925, and Harold in 1933 at 24 years.

7. 5th Cousins: Nancy G. Witter (1925-2004) and Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

Nancy grew up on that Glendale dairy farm and married her Army sweetheart, an airplane mechanic with aspirations of becoming a pilot, in the early days of the Second World War. They raised two kids in Glendale, Arizona, and taught in the Glendale schools for their whole careers; he taught math, and she taught art. They were my grandparents, which makes me "twice removed" from grandma and cousin Dick, who are "5th cousins".

Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States. He graduated from Duke University, became a lawyer in Whittier, where he grew up, in 1937 - about four years after his brother had died of tuberculosis. He married Thelma "Pat" Ryan on 21 June 1940, and after the War they had two daughters, Tricia (born 1946) and Julie (born 1948).

More Generations and Relationships

Now that you've come this far, hopefully you will have an easier time understanding the way genealogists refer to cousins. Simply being some kind of "cousin" means that two people share a common ancestor; the ordinal number (ie, "5th") tells you how many generations back that common ancestor is; and the "X removed" tells you the number of generations between the two cousins.

If we keep following the ancestral paths above, for example, I can claim even more "famous" relationships. Julie Nixon (6th cousin to my dad, and my 6th cousin, 1x removed) married David Eisenhower, son of General and 34th U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. That means that I would be a 7th cousin to President Eisenhower's grandchildren! But, because we're only related by marriage, the whole "cousin" thing doesn't apply to me and POTUS 34; he is merely "father-in-law of my 6th cousin, 1x removed" and not my "5th cousin, twice removed" the way Mr. Nixon is.

But my children and Julie's grandchildren will all be 8th cousins, and so on.

And what does all of this gain for us?  Are there treasures and perks associated with being distant cousins to the American version of royalty?  Not really. Though for me, it reinforces the notion that the "great men" of history aren't the interesting part of the story. There are more than two dozen people between me and President Nixon who lived adventurous lives and have interesting stories.

From the possibly scandalous origin of Mary Magdalene Livingston to the tragedies leading to the marriage of Aaron and Hannah Murray; and between the wars, disasters, diseases, and accidents that threatened all of them there are so many things that had to happen just right so that the famous person and I could both be here.  For me, it is just as exciting to discover those average, normal people who lived their average, normal lives as it is to learn about those who had their hand in larger events.

And I love that when you look at history from this point of view, even Presidents are just people - they're just acorns, perhaps a little Mightier than the rest for a brief time.

Photo Feature: Loren Weddle - Classmate or Cousin?

This, the evidence would indicate, is Loren Weddle in Phoenix, Arizona, 1927.

Loren Weddle, 1927

The question is, who is Loren Weddle? The studio inscription says "Russell, Phoenix" which tells me this me this could be someone that the Huff or Witter folks knew.

I have a few portraits in the box from the same studio, which could mean that these are classmates of some relative who would have been in school in 1927. We'll take a look at all of them next week, but I wanted to single Loren out because he looks suspiciously like the younger man in this portrait:

For some reason, I have two copies of this portrait which are identical to each other - right down to the lack of any identification other than the "Oates" studio inscription in the lower right corner. If it is the same young man, he might be more than just a classmate - but either way, he's a mystery!

As always, if you have any clues, dive into the comments below or drop me a private note.

Foundation Found, Providence Provided

Map and inset made from Google maps and Wikipedia

On February 9, 1597, Mary, the wife of Sir Richard Greene, the Lord of Bowridge Hill, gave birth to a son they named John.  Bowridge Hill had been the birthplace of three generations of Greenes, starting with Sir Richard's grandfather, Robert. It was - and is - located about eight miles from the village of Gillingham in the English county of Dorset.

Mary's father was John Hooker, who had been a prominent historian and Member of Parliament. Coming from a family with rank and education, young John Greene grew up in a privileged environment, with titles such as "Mr." and "Gent" applied to his name on many of the records that refer to him. He trained as a surgeon, and moved to Salisbury, in Wiltshire, where he practiced his profession and lived for 16 years.

Around the time he moved to Salisbury, in 1619, on the fourth of November, John married Joanne Tattershall. It isn't clear how her family came by that surname (and the spellings do vary quite a bit), but it indicates some relationship to the town and castle of Tattershall located in Lincolnshire.

Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire

Just through sheer coincidence, 379 years later, the 11th great-grandson of John and Joanne - yours truly! - was stationed at a Royal Air Force camp in Lincolnshire as a member of the United States Air Force. It is unlikely that Joanne or any of her immediate ancestry lived in the castle, since it had been sold to the Earl of Lincoln by her time, but it is exciting to find a connection to the place. We visited it several times while we lived in Lincolnshire, notably for a U.S.-UK 4th of July celebration in 1998.

On the 6th of April, 1635 at 45 years of age, John Greene registered for embarkation with his wife and six children on the James of London - William Cooper, Master. After a voyage of fifty-eight days, they arrived in Boston on 3 June. Their prospects seemed good - a surgeon in the colonies was a rare and valuable thing, and John joined the church at Salem, led by Roger Williams.

Sadly, things began to turn difficult almost as soon as the family settled in. In August of 1635, a hurricane swept through the young colony, drowning farms and wrecking houses. In October, Roger Williams was convicted of sedition and heresy, and he famously fled Boston in a blizzard in January 1636. Somewhere among these events, Joanne died. Most of the children were 10 or under, so John remarried to a widow named Alice Daniels in 1637, and the family acquired a home lot in Roger Williams's new settlement of Providence.

List of original 12 members, from
Henry Melville King's
Historical catalogue of the members of the 
First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island

The following year saw the establishment of the First Baptist Church of Providence, the first Baptist church in the Americas.  After meeting in Williams's home for the first year, the group of believers were baptized by Williams in the Seekonk river in 1638 - a group that included John Greene, surgeon.

In 1642 Samuel Gorton and Narragansett Indian Chief Sachem Miantonomi agreed to exchange 144 fathoms of Wampumpeague for what was known as "The Shawhomett Purchase" (also spelled "Shawomet"). However, the purchase was disputed by two other sachems of the area, Sacononoco and Pumham; they complained to the Massachusetts colony that Miantonomi had sold the land without asking for their approval. They took their case to Boston, where they placed their lands under Massachusetts rule, and in October 1643 Massachusetts sent a militia force of "forty mounted and armed men” from Boston to arrest Gorton and his neighbors. The militia fired over the houses, and the women and children fled to the woods.

Samuel Gorton wrote of this attack of the Massachusetts troops:

"Afflicting our wifes and children, forcing them to betake themselves, some into the woods among the Indians, suffering such hardships as occasioned the death of divers of them, as the wife of John Greene, as, also, the wife of Robert Potter."

After a tense standoff, all but three of Gorton's settlers surrendered to the Massachusetts force. This event prompted the other three towns on Narragansett Bay (Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport) to unite and get a royal charter allowing the towns on Narragansett Bay to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. In 1648, Gorton was granted a Charter by Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, Lord Admiral and head of the Parliamentary Commission on Plantation Affairs. After this, the name of the settlement was changed from Shawomet to Warwick. While Massachusetts continued to lay claim to the area, it made no further effort to enforce it.

It isn't clear whether John Greene was part of the effort to obtain the royal charter, but he did sail back to England in 1644. There, he received a number of Latin books that had been willed to him by his brother, and he married his third wife, Phillipa, with whom he returned to Warwick in 1646. Upon his return, he became a leader of the community of Warwick, first being elected to the Town Council in August 1647, and later serving as town Commissioner from 1655-1657.

John Greene, surgeon, died in Warwick in January of 1659, a respectable 69 years of age.

His son, James, had married Deliverance Potter the previous year; her mother, Isabel, was the "wife of Robert Potter" who had died along with James's step-mother, Alice¹, in the 1643 attack on Shawomet. They had two sons and two daughters (all under age 5) when Deliverance died in 1664. James remarried the following year to Elizabeth Anthony.

James and Elizabeth had 8 more children - including my ancestor, the John Greene known for building the estate, "Potowomut" - and the line continued until 8 generations later, when we arrive at my grandmother's grandmother, Florence Mabel Hart - one of "My Sixteen." That makes John Greene, the surgeon, and Joanne Tattershall my 11th great-grandparents.

1. Footnote: Some accounts say that it was Joanne, not Alice, who died in the 1643 event. I went with this version of the story for the sake of telling the story without a confusing debate in the middle, but I don't want anyone to think I claim to speak authoritatively as to which wife it was. If there is a real historian reading this who would like to set me straight, I'm happy to edit!

Photo Feature: Baby New Year!

Ring in New Year 2015 with these old baby photos!

While I don't have any clues to help identify the first four, I do know who the happy little guy below is - Edward Lee Fitzsimmons, at age 6 months.

Edward Lee Fitzsimmons, 6 months

Someone thoughtfully penciled that information on the back of his portrait, taken at "C.D. Bancroft Studio Grand; 402 B-Way, Co. Bluffs, IA" - and I have several census records putting his birthday in February 1912, so that would make this photo (quick calculation) more than a century old!

Edward's grandmother was the older sister of my great-great grandmother, Rosa Murray. That makes him my 2nd cousin, twice removed.

Emma Jane Murray was born in Indiana in 1854, and moved to Neosho county, Kansas with her parents, Aaron and Hannah (Bender) Murray, after the Civil War. She married Alonzo Parker in 1872, and their 2nd daughter, Jennie May, was born in 1875. She married Edward E. Fitzsimmons in 1899, and they moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa around 1901, and then 100 miles north to Grant City by 1910.  Their third child, born there 2 years later, was baby Edward Lee!

Faiths of Our Fathers

Growing up, my immediate family members were all Southern Baptists. I knew, of course, that there were other kinds of churches, but it wasn't until we took a trip to New Jersey to visit my grandma's side of the family and we visited their church on Sunday that it occurred to me that my own family would attend a truly different kind of church.

Back then, I was mildly scandalized by this. I started asking questions, like, "What is the difference between their church and ours?" The answers I got seemed as perplexing for the adults providing them as they were for me to understand.

"Are they going to hell for going to a different church?" (No, of course not.)
"Then does it matter which kind they go to?" (No, I suppose not.)
"Then why don't we go to that kind of church ourselves?" (Um...look at that, it's your bed time!)
"But what does it all mean!?!"

For a 12-year-old theologian in training, trying to figure out the differences between your family's various religious traditions can be scary and disturbing; but for a 42-year-old family historian, it can be a very useful tool for understanding what ancestors you never met might have been like. By studying the types of churches they belonged to, you can develop some guesses about what they believed and how they behaved.

Here's a quick tour of a few of my family's religious traditions, based on what I've been able to learn so far.

The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians

While I don't know yet precisely where the early Callin folk came from, it is probably safe to assume that my ancestors were part of the migration of Scotch-Irish Protestants to Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. Because they were in the midst of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, they were frequently in conflict with the tribes who lived along the frontier - especially in Pennsylvania, whose pacifist Quaker leaders had made no provision for a militia.

Most of these people identified as Presbyterian, and their theology typically emphasized the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures, and the necessity of grace through faith in Christ - all of which sounds familiar to this former Southern Baptist. However, they tended not to hold to some of the more severe notions of "purity" - like refraining from strong drink, fighting, and behaving bawdily - and I suspect their behavior had as much to do with driving a wedge between them and their puritanical neighbors (the ones running the local colonial governments) as any theological differences.

It is interesting to note that I haven't found any ancestors who identified as Catholic, yet. The only actual Irish ancestors I've identified so far - the Greenlee family - came from Armagh, and identified as Unionists and Protestants. So even though they came to the States in 1846, during the Great Potato Famine, they had more in common with the Scots-Irish Callin families who were already here than with the large numbers of Irish Catholics immigrating at the same time.

The Pennsylvania Dutch

My paternal grandmother's families included the Witter, Shriver and Piper families - all of whom seem to have been early German settlers in Pennsylvania - the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Witter and Piper (from "Pfeiffer") families settled in and around the Amberson Valley for several generations before spreading out to settle in Kansas.

The Frey family (on my maternal grandmother's side of the family) were also from an area near the borders of France, Switzerland, and Germany, and they certainly Lutherans - though they came over 100 years after the true "Pennsylvania Dutch" families arrived.

The Pennsylvania Dutch maintained numerous religious affiliations, with the greatest number being Lutheran or Reformed. Many were Anabaptists as well, but I suspect my ancestors were probably Lutheran, based on the churches mentioned in the documents I have found. Lutheranism advocates a doctrine of justification "by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Scripture alone" - the doctrine that scripture is the final authority on all matters of faith.

Most Reformed churches denied the belief of the Catholic Church defined at the Council of Trent concerning authority coming from both the Scriptures and Tradition. Needless to say, that denial was why the Catholic nations of Europe drove members of these churches out.

Methodists

Back on my paternal grandfather's side, the Hales family seems to have been part of the Methodist-Episcopal church; my 4th great grand uncle, John Hales, was received into the ministry in 1820 in Baltimore, and was located with a church mission in Illinois in 1825. My 2nd great-grandmother, Alice Ava Hales (on of My Sixteen), was buried in the First Methodist Church in Fostoria, Ohio one hundred years later, in 1942.

My paternal grandmother's great-grandparents, Aaron and Hannah (Bender) Murray, were charter members of the Methodist church organized in Stark, Kansas, in 1886. The Benders were Swiss Mennonites and Germans, driven from the Pfaltz by Catholics and settling in Pennsylvania in the pre-Revolutionary days. The Murrays arrived from Scotland just after the American Revolution in the 1800s. It seems clear that whatever faith the families brought with them, once in America, they found the Methodist message to be very compelling.

Most Methodists identify with a conception of free will through God's grace, as opposed to the theological determinism of absolute predestination of the Calvinist traditions prevalent in Reformed or Lutheran churches. (Yes, I cribbed that from the Wikipedia article.) If you think about that, the severe character of Calvinist churches must have seemed as oppressive to the second and third generations raised under that philosophy as the Catholic and Anglican churches seemed to the original Calvinists. I imagine that the refreshing notion of free will and grace caught up a number of my ancestors during the many Revival periods that swept the country over the years.

Baptists

Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island and the first Baptist church in America. He was a questioning theologian who famously ran afoul of the puritan-run colonial government in Boston, and became a champion of the idea of separating church and state. One of the original members of that First Baptist Church that Williams formed in 1638 was an ancestor of my maternal grandmother.

There is a lot of room in 350 years of history for things to change; one of the things that changed was the nature of the Baptist churches - which, partly because of their insistence on not having official, established doctrines, were prone to splits and schisms. One of the most divisive issues in American history was slavery, and in the mid-1800s, many Baptist churches tore themselves apart over the issue of abolition. The Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 in Atlanta, Georgia, following a split from northern Baptists over the issue of forbidding Southern slave-owners from becoming ordained missionaries.

In the 1940s, around the time my grandfathers were growing up, the SBC had begun to move away from their historical and regional positions, but change takes time, especially in a theology based on individual conscience.

Modern Times

Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather were ordained Southern Baptist ministers. In the early 1980s, my parents hosted a little Southern Baptist church in our garage, until they raised money for property and a worship building in our neighborhood.  My sister's husband has even done mission work, taking my nephew with him on trips to build a church in Latin America.

Just in that narrow group of people, all of whom agree to assume the same religious label, you can see wildly different approaches to life and theology. That individuality is the legacy of those original Baptist churches, which insisted on each individual having to find their own path to salvation. That's a tremendously democratic, American idea.

Looking at the religious history of America, it's easy to point to the oppression and conflict that drove the original groups to flee their homes, and even easier to point out the hypocrisy of the groups that showed the same kind of oppression to those who came here after they did. But after they arrived here and attempted to create their own versions of heaven on earth, you can see how most church-based communities either evolved to be more inclusive, thriving ecumenical groups - or retreated into insular, intolerant backwaters. Even today, there are secluded communities of Amish, Mennonites and Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania, though many (like my ancestors) eventually struck out to mark their own path - both physically and geographically.

That's why I value the notion shared by the original Baptists - and founders like Thomas Jefferson - of separating church and the state. When it came time to create a government designed to represent the will of the people, they wisely left out the usual religious language of God and Divine Will that could be seen in so many other charters and constitutions of the time. They realized that it was far too easy for religion and government to corrupt each other, so instead, they argued to make government a neutral arena where your religion would neither be held against you nor imposed on anyone else.

Because the United States chose to become a place where anyone with an idea could speak publicly about it without fear they would be arrested, it became a place where many did just that. Revivals swept the land during the so-called "Great Awakenings" - times when new ideas, and even whole new religions, sprang up.

Growing up, my elders spoke about those revivals fondly and wistfully, and the churches I grew up in frequently held week-long "revivals" - but if you go read about some of those early versions, there were some pretty wild and radical ideas being spread along with that "old time religion" that the elders recalled. Without the buffer of neutrality between government and some of the established churches, I wonder how far some of those revivals would have gotten before blasphemy laws and notions of "corrupting the youth" shut them down. And without that buffer of neutrality, I wonder whether all of my ancestors - with their different backgrounds, beliefs, and "bawdy" or beatific behaviors - would have been able to get together at all.

I suppose if they hadn't, I wouldn't be here to wonder.

Photo Feature: Christmas at White Bear Lake

Merry Christmas, from c.1938!

This is the Holmquist family in the festive living room of their home in Mahtomedi, Minnesota.  William Arvid is seated, with his wife, Hilder; their three children - Ruth, Arvid Wesley ("Bud"), and Lillian ("Lil") behind them.

William Arvid was born in Sweden in the 1880s, arrived in the U.S. around 1910, and married Hilder in St. Paul. Hilder was born in New York in 1888, her parents having immigrated from Sweden around that time. Bud was the grandfather of my lovely bride.

Here's hoping your holidays are warm and cheerful!