Reelin' in the Years, with apologies to Steely Dan

Today is one of those "big" birthdays, and I beg your tolerance for this self-indulgent post. Don’t tell me  it’s “just a number.” I know that. I say those words to myself all the time. But the number is BIG.

At my time of life, it feels really important to look at myself, see what I’ve done.

At the start of the last big decade, I was on the highway headed to Arkansas, with a daughter who was along to help bring Thanksgiving to one of the sisters. I was driving. That’s a long road, and my companion wasn't much interested in fighting rush hour in Little Rock, or the steep hills near Fayetteville, and I didn’t blame her. So I kept my hands on the steering wheel and, for a while, felt sorry for myself.

That day was actually my birthday, too, and I was just racking miles—460 of them—onto myself and my car, and the day was like any other, nothing special. It wasn’t until almost this next decade-marker that the epiphany happened: Where else would I have been—at home, watching a movie, or out buying more clothes I didn’t need, or eating an expensive but ultimately unsatisfying and soon-forgotten meal in a restaurant?

No: I was driving to one daughter’s house, with another one with me, and we were engaged in lively conversation as the miles ticked off past some pretty awesome scenery, all things considered.

And since that decade-marker, ten really well-lived years have passed.

The ancients marked the seasons with awesome monuments—Stonehenge and Chichén Itzá come to mind. We know passages were important events to them. So it’s not totally a self-centered thing for me to reflect on this day, and to tag it as significant.

I don’t often let people catch me anymore for photographs. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s probably something egotistical coming out in me. But today I’m going to put it all out there, as many of my school-year pictures as I can glean from the cardboard box that holds my photos, and a good many others that show what was important during all these years, what mattered, as I’ve come to see it now.

Starting with the earliest ones:

1954

1955

1956

My sister Carol had me on her lap outside the house where we lived; then, later, Jack and I were having to share the stroller. And that's me, a cheerful little girl,  handing something to a person I don't remember now, somebody not likely in this world anymore. 

Now, the obligatory parade of school-year photos, minus several here and there:

I didn’t like school, not for a while, at least--ironic for a person destined to be a teacher. It seemed a pretty worthless enterprise to me, so I left and walked home... several times, in fact. Mrs. Smith, a wise lady if ever there was one, let me be her “helper,” enough of an incentive for me to give it a few more weeks. Yet all you see are smiles here. Kids are so open and curious. It’d be nice if we could stay that way. So, above, first, second, third, fourth grades.

There were other things going on during those years: trips to the beach (starting off young!), hangin’ with my brother and sister at home, posing for Easter photos.

More school photos, and then, college….

Fifth grade

Sixth grade

1970

1971

In fifth grade, glasses. I’d always sat near the front of the room, because of my last name, so my inability to see at distance didn’t matter much. But vision screenings were a thing that year, and I got my first pair of spectacles—cat-eye ones, of course. I didn’t hate glasses at all. For the first time in years, when I looked down, I could see individual pebbles on the ground. Before glasses, it was all just a tan blur at my feet. In 1969 I upgraded to black ovals.

1972

John Lennon wore wire-rims in 1966. Took me until 1972 to get mine.

And, suddenly, there I was, a teacher, and I looked earnest and idealistic:

1974

1978

1980

These were from my Caledonia HS years.

I had several “goals” (I actually called them that) when I was in school. One was to teach. I never thought of pursuing another career, or occupation, or profession, whatever you’d like to say. It was simply my identity for a long time...still is. Another thing I wanted from life was to be a mother. This was from 1983 before Erin was born, and, below that, 1990, when Karen was on the way. I don’t have many photos of myself when I was pregnant. I didn’t mind the “look”—I just didn’t pose. 

 

I stayed at home for a while, doing field-trip duty and homeroom-mom chores, and eventually worked at a company where my Spanish voice was useful with the Hispanic employees. But there was just nothing like teaching. So a lot of the next photos are from the years when I was at Starkville High School. 

Tip: Don’t wear black to a prom unless you want to bring the gloom and doom. It does contrast nicely against the bright gowns of the girls, though. At least THEY looked good.

2017

2017

2016

2016

2011

I loved teaching. But in the past several years I’ve figured out what was most important to me: things like helping Karen paint her theatre set; working with Lauren on her research--getting soaked by sudden rainshowers in the process; being present for Erin's and Deanna's college graduations (all the girls' graduations, actually); trips to the mountains; whitewater rafting…

2022

And the selfies I took in 2016, 2018, 2022 don’t remind me much of that sweet toddler at the top. I wish I could lie believably about that; but we change and aren’t the same people we start out as.

I said above: I avoid photographs. But if you’ve been doing sums, and thinking about all this talk of decade-markers, you’ll have figured out: today I am seventy years old. I decided not to hide from this. Seventy deserves courage.

2016

2018

2022

And there’s been a lot of living in these years.

Thank you all for the birthday greetings. 

My Own Grandpa

A while back, a cousin asked me if the family relationship in that old Ray Stevens song “I’m My Own Grandpa” was really possible. (Thanks, Suzanne, for helping me use up a bunch of minutes and a lot of Expo marker on a white board chasing it all down!)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlJH81dSiw&pp=ygUSSSdtIE15IE93biBHcmFuZHBh

Of course, songwriters Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe knew their business: that guy COULD be called his own grandfather, by the time you got through all those births and marriages. But it wasn't the equivalent of a brand-new viral video, back when it came out in 1947: the song, per Wikipedia, was once a “news” piece originally posted in 1822 in the Republican Chronicle of Ithaca, NY--which may have copied the story from an even earlier item in the London Literary Gazette.

How to tell what cousin you are

[And we scratch our heads today when our social media accounts are hacked or spoofed, and ask, “Why don’t these people find something to do?” Turns out that for at least 200 years, folks have wasted time figuring out twisted genealogies. Ah, those lovely days before smart phones.]

Which leads me to another question raised a few months back about where a recently-deceased relative fit into the family tree. The person who asked me knew he belonged somewhere; but, how close? Who were his parents and grandparents?

This made me really sad and even a little anxious. Time passes, and we lose track of each other. My daughters have cousins they wouldn’t recognize from Adam—to put it the old way.

And there’s another issue: at least two generations could’ve fit into the span of Sam and Maggie Alawine’s group of children—actually, you could say two generations WERE there, since their oldest daughter Ila was born in 1897 and the youngest, Omera, in 1924, a stretch of 27 years! By age, Omera could’ve easily been Ila’s own child, and the same was true of the last five children Maggie had. So I hardly knew any of my oldest relatives.

And it's ALSO true of my own family: my oldest brother could’ve been my father.

It made me realize we don’t really know that much about our second cousins, and even less about THEIR children. So this post is to help fill in information, and I want everybody to help, as much as you can, with details about your own families. Look over this chart, which shows the children of Sam and Maggie and their descendants. And be sure to look at the notes at the very bottom of the last section.

Email me with additional details, or comment at the bottom of my post. There are definitely blanks to be filled in here and there...like, for instance, who was Rubye Smith married to? (And there are other unknowns of that sort.) Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed already.

Ælfwine

Old Photos and Secrets

How easy it is to do things today. How much we take for granted.

I was at Vicki’s the other day, scanning a set of very old photographs for posterity’s sake (and yours!). It was an easy matter to unplug my HP scanner, pick up my laptop computer, and then reconnect them at her house and get to work.

Modern scanners entered the market in the 1980's, although resolutions (measured in dots per inch, or DPI) remained low until the late 1990's. This meant "what you see is what you get" scanning wasn't possible, as scanners lost much of the image in processing. https://www.techwalla.com/articles/the-history-of-computer-scanners

In the ’70s a photo scan sent to a newspaper office could take seven minutes. Excruciatingly slow.

The whole process of scanning 25-30 old pictures at Vicki’s house took about an hour…longer, if you add in the lunch and a long visit between cousins. And each picture wasn’t just a get-the-image-into-the-computer operation: time was taken up “cleaning” the photos and sometimes rescanning them if the first result didn’t turn out well.

My point, though, is that it was relatively fast and easy. The pictures I scanned are quite old, and producing the originals, long ago, was frequently a tedious  process. In the case of a tintype or daguerreotype, applying the chemicals in the right order to fix an image onto a piece of metal took a lot of time. Wikipedia says:

To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treated it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive; exposed it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; made the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapor; removed its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment; rinsed and dried it; and then sealed the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.

And you ever wonder why nobody in those old photos seemed to be having any fun? Part of that answer is, of course, that people had to be still a little longer than we do today while the image was exposed; but that’s not the whole story, as this great Vox article points out:

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs

Well, back to my visit and those old pictures. Below are a couple that I think will be of interest to Alawine cousins, and I’m offering as well a challenge.

First, these images are on metal, not paper. The first scans are of Rena Alawine, oldest child of Andrew and Lucretia Alawine. She was murdered in the mid-1870s, her assailant never serving time for the deed. For a more in-depth telling of that event, read my previous post about it.

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_28.html 

The image was produced on metal and is about an inch and a half square.

Rena Alawine, ca 1876-7, lightened and altered image; original about 1.5" square

Rena Alawine original-color image

It’s in a very old case with a little clasp at the side. (See the very top of this post for a view of the back of the case.) Creacie, the third-oldest child of Sam and Maggie Alawine, did not have children herself. After Sam and Maggie “broke up housekeeping,” as it was called in those days—in other words, left their own house and went to live somewhere else, as they got old—they came to Creacie’s home, and there they also left old photos when they died. Creacie preserved the pictures, handed them to Beatrice, her younger sister, who passed them on to Vicki.

From her grandparents Andrew and Lucretia, Creacie would’ve heard first-hand the story of Rena’s death; she identified Rena as the child in these scans. Therefore, the image on the tiny metal plate is from perhaps 1876 or ’77. When I took the scans back to my own house and enhanced them with photo-editing software, to bring out any obscure details, a china-headed doll held in the crook of Rena’s right arm became easily visible. Did the photographer have one along for his child subjects to hold? In those hard times, it wouldn't be all that likely for a toddler to have a store-bought doll.

Considering the tragic details of her life, one can imagine why her parents preserved this image.

The second set of scans here I BELIEVE to be of Andrew Jackson Alawine, my great-grandfather and the father of Rena. For years I heard about a photograph or image of him as a young man—younger than the earliest photo I’d seen, which shows him and Lucretia Wells at some time shortly after their marriage.

Lucretia Wells and Andrew Alawine, ca 1868-71

No one seemed to know where the other picture was.

The problem is that Andrew grew a beard during the Civil War and was never again clean-shaven. So you have to
digitally (or imaginatively) add a beard like the one in those later years to make an accurate comparison.

Several points between the two photos do correlate. First, the young man’s right eye is smaller than his left. The same is apparently true of the bearded, older Andrew. Zoom in on the hairlines and ear lobes of the men in the two images, and they appear also to be similar.

Andrew? in 1861

Andrew in 1868-71

Lightening up the original scan brought out a few more details in the clothing. The fabric in a part of his jacket is wide-woven cloth.

Wide-woven fabric details; button

The bright buttons may not be typical, usual daywear for a young man of that time. Andrew was in the cavalry during the Civil War. Does this resemble a cavalry uniform?

His mother was listed as a seamstress in the 1860 census.

1860 Census Yazoo County MS. Andrew's age may be off a year or two.

Did she sew that uniform—if that’s what it is—for him when he enlisted? —No one can answer this question today, but it’s something to think about.

It’s known that he joined at the age of 16 or a little older; this young man appears to be in his upper teens.

So it’s my guess—but only a guess—that since this tintype was in the same batch of old photos that Creacie saved, along with the one of Rena, and no one else fits the overall profile of this man, the image is likely to be of Andrew Alawine, and therefore from about 1861 or so, a period of time when tintypes were being produced. There was money to be made for an enterprising image-taker who traveled around the states, even into rural areas, giving people a chance to get their likeness on a piece of metal. It was novel, and fascinating; and if you didn’t mind posing for a while, apparently well worth it.

So the challenge for anyone with some facial-recognition software: can you make a determination as to whether this old tintype is likely of Andrew J. Alawine? 

Ælfwine