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

Just the Facts, Ma'am--Or, a Quick Review

Alawines, ca. 1902

I am a wuss. 

Hard thing for a longtime teacher to admit, but as I get older, I’m becoming a wuss. It’s really hard for me to go to reunions where so many people are no longer with us. I am just not strong that way.

One of my family-type memories is of a late-night, mournful trip up Highway 19 to the house of one of my aunts when my Aunt Bonnie Fay (Daddy’s younger sister) died unexpectedly. Mother of course was going to be with Daddy, and she took at least us younger sibs along. The car was very quiet as Daddy drove.

Years later, when I was at Ole Miss, he called to tell me his sister Turin (one of the twins) had died. I didn’t know what to say to him. My roommate, a lawyer-to-be, watched me for some time when the phone call was over and at last asked, very solemnly, “OK, what’s wrong? I know something’s wrong.”

…So, a lot of my memories are of people passing on. Four of my own five brothers are gone; my parents, all the aunts and uncles, most of their children—my first cousins...being the youngest of that group, I find it painful to remember the others. And I see time running out on me, too.

I have in my mind pictures of what the reunions were, and—sorry, cousins—they aren’t the same for me anymore. I don’t feel ashamed of this. Once, being really sentimental and nostalgic, I told Daddy I could “just see” all those family members—his, and our own—running around through the woods at Alawine Springs, playing near the spring itself, and he gave me a tolerant look and said, “I don’t. All these woods weren’t here. It was fields, all growing crops.”

Things change.

A few of you have got in touch with me these past two weeks to ask about who’s in some old pictures, so I’m going to summarize in this post all the relevant facts about the family again, and then if you want to delve into other stories beyond just those facts, I’ll steer you to the right place.  

Here’s a chart, prepared by Bill Alewine of Virginia, showing the lineage from the earliest Alewine/Genewein on record. Notice that for whatever reason, the earliest documents from 1752 do show “Genewein” or something like it, sometimes “Genewyn” or “Geneweyr.” By 1786 it was “Ellwine,” and in 1795 it had become “Ellawine” and finally “Alewine,” in 1800. 

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2019/02/whats-in-name-part-two.html

If you’re interested in figuring out how YOU fit into this, look at these charts, and you’ll see the Wellses, Mercers, Richardses, and others. At the bottom are Samuel Thomas Alawine and Maggie Evalina Skinner, my grandparents.

The photograph at the top of this page, taken about 1902 or ’03, shows the Alawines back to Andrew Jackson Alawine (center, big beard), who’s holding his namesake Andrew Thaggard on his lap. Next to him is his wife Lucretia “Crecie” Wells Alawine. I’ve only identified the adults in this photo, because there would otherwise be too many names cluttering it. However, Ila Dean Alawine is the child with her arms over Andrew’s and Crecie’s knees; Maggie is holding Clara, and Samuel Thomas is holding Creacie; the other assorted children I haven’t ID’d are offspring of either Will and Mattie Alawine or Kate and Will Thaggard. You might call this photograph the "original" reunion picture. 

Here are some photos from the family reunions at Alawine Springs through the years. I’m including only the children of Samuel T. Alawine and his brother James T. Alawine.

By 1986 only six came. Front row: Creacie, Ola Mae, Beatrice. Back: Sammy, Bob, Omera

1977. Front: Sylvia, Pruitt, Creacie, Sammy. Back: Omera, Bob, Beatrice, Ola Mae

1950's. All the siblings (Beatrice is cut off at the left.) 
Front, l-r: Bob, Pruitt, Roosevelt, Sammy
Back, l-r: Bea, Creacie, Omera, Ola Mae, Bonnie, Ila, Turin, Sylvia, Clara, Bessie (Gwen in very back)

1940's, and below. Grandchildren: Don Smith with Billy Perkins; Bob's sons, including one Agnes is holding; Roosevelt's children

In-laws: Mildred (Pruitt); Ernest (Ola Mae); Cecile (Bob); Marcus (Bessie); Artie Mae (Roosevelt)

Sisters, l-r: Ola Mae, Bessie, Bonnie Fay, Beatrice, Omera, Ila Dean

Brothers, l-r: Roosevelt, Sammy, Pruitt, Bob

Here are some quick links:

If you’ve heard the Antioch ghost story and want to read a little more about it, here’s a link to a  post telling about it. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/08/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

If you’ve heard about the Skinners’ carpentry skills, go here. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-carpenters.html

If you want to know about how war has affected your own ancestors who fought, read this. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-elephant.html

Here’s a place to find out about the Wells line. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

My father told me what it was like to go from Kemper to Meridian back in 1918. Read his story here. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/07/world-changers.html

Some of you have possibly heard about the child who was shot. Same, about the tale of the man who killed his brother-in-law and apparently escaped. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_28.html

Times were rough right after the Civil War. Here’s a take on that. https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-story-behind-faces.html

Skinners, anyone? https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-tree-and-revolution.html

Or maybe, the Mercers? https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-mercer-connection.html

If you want to know MY theory about how we have absolutely no Native American DNA in us, and yet everybody grew up thinking we did, read this. http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/08/cant-deny-your-dna.html 

Ælfwine

Walk on the Wild Side

Here’s my first wildflower “lesson” for parents with kids at home this week. Today’s a beautiful, albeit cloudy, spring day, so let’s just take a short walk in the back yard or a little ways down the sidewalk. You can first make a list of these common flowers, have kids take photos of what they find, and go back home to ID them on the Internet; or you could look at my pictures first and see how many of them you can find on your walk. Here's the list: 

Spring beauty

First, these—the ubiquitous spring beauty.
They’re all over my back yard right now, so if I look out at a certain angle I think for a second, “Wait—is that WATER?” because they can appear white from a distance, in a large group.

There’s variation, though, in the color, so if you see really pink ones separated from a group of lighter-colored ones, you might be fooled about what they actually are.

Light-pink and dark-pink spring beauty

A sweet little spring flower that’s just started blooming in easy-to-spot masses—one of my favorites—is the bluet (below, with Spring Beauty behind it). 

It goes by the scientific name Houstonia, and there are several types. It’s tiny, but whenever I start actually seeing bluets, I know spring’s arrived.

Everybody knows how to find dandelions, so I won’t include them; but another yellow wildflower you can see everywhere right now is the butterweed—not to be confused with the bitterweed, which truly lives up to its name, if you’ve ever tried picking them in the summer or fall.

Butterweed

Butterweeds are taller, they don’t seem to stink, and you’ll find them many times in damp places—ditches, for instance, that are sometimes but not always full of water.

Don’t confuse butterweed with buttercup.

Buttercup

You can tell these apart just by noticing that the buttercup is usually closer to the ground, and shiny, as if somebody’s walked around and painted the petals with clear nail polish. It’s around now in a lot of places.

At my old house in Macon—ca. 1892—I’d observed one spring these lovely babies springing up, and it wasn’t until I did some research on them that I found out they’re actually prairie-type flowers (appropriate for the Macon area, of course), and they aren’t really all that common anymore, because of habitat loss.

Carolina anemones, or windflowers

So you probably won’t see them in a town. They’re called Carolina anemones (or Carolina windflowers), and I was overjoyed to find them a couple of years ago at the end of my long driveway. I guess the area where I’m living right now is another one of those (like my Macon back yard) where prairie soil wasn’t completely removed or disturbed too much. Here it is with a clump of purple deadnettle behind it. There's a lot of that coming up right now. It looks something like henbit, on steroids; henbit was blooming a few weeks ago.

Henbit, from the Paducah Sun

Carolina windflower in front, purple deadnettle in back

Look for the windflower and consider yourself lucky if you find it.

But don’t get it mixed up with the next two plants here, the first of which is the common wild garlic.

Wild garlic, middle, and spring beauty, right and front

My dog loves to sniff these little things—and I have no idea why, except maybe that dogs like stinky stuff. And spring beauty is in front of them in this picture; the garlic is the tall, yellow-centered flowers at the back.

This is daisy fleabane.

Daisy fleabane

Sounds like a person's first and last name, right? It’s called “daisy” because, I guess, it resembles that flower, in miniature, but the “fleabane” part comes from an old belief that you could sprinkle the dried flowers in a house to get rid of fleas (thus, the “bane”). Of course, it can’t do that. Its scientific name is Erigeron annuus. By the way, the word "daisy" came from "day's-eye," because the flower opens in the day and closes at night. And second by-the-way: "daisy" is "margarita," in Spanish.

Another little white flower, easily overlooked, is the mouse-ear chickweed.

Mouse-ear chickweed

To ID this one, pay attention to the cleft (split) at the end of each petal in the tiny thing.

This isn't technically a wildflower, but since they're blooming in my yard (from bulbs), I'm going to include them--"snowdrops." They're an old-fashioned flower you don't see just everywhere. Notice there are green dots all around the edges of each flower.

I haven't yet found shepherd's purse. It does look like what its name says it is.

Brittanica

And, speaking of white flowers, don’t overlook the white Dutch clover, which is everywhere now but original to Europe.

People introduced it as forage for food animals, and we find our good luck among its leaves! Or, if you like, you can tie the long stems together and make clover necklaces, bracelets, or—if your patience or skill are lacking—little rings.

There are several other clovers—yellow hop clover,

Yellow hop clover

Persian clover, rabbit’s-foot clover (THAT is fun to find!), the red clover we see along highways—but they don’t seem to be around just yet. Do some research on them so that you can recognize them when they do show up. By the way, once you FEEL rabbit’s-foot clover, you know what you have. It’s kind of very light purplish-pink and so soft, it really IS like a rabbit’s foot.

I took this picture to show you something you’ll start seeing soon: lyre-leaf sage.

Lyre-leaf sage, the purplish stuff

It’s slightly purple, mostly low on the ground right now, no flowers yet. Don’t mix it up with the thistle, which will let you know, unpleasantly, if you do.

Thistles, to the left, to the right!

The sage hasn’t started getting tall yet, so if you reach for a purplish, fuzzy plant that IS getting kind of wide and tall, double-check before you try to touch it. Here’s what the lyre-leaf sage will eventually bloom into:

from Crooked Bear Creek Organics

Like purple deadnettle, lyre-leaf sage is a member of the mint family. How can you tell? Both of them have square stems!

I didn’t get a picture of toadflax; they were already coming up on the coast last week, but I didn’t find them this morning in my neighborhood. You may have them where you live, though. They are SMALL flowers on a TALL stem. Here's a picture from the North American Butterfly Association:

Toadflax

Finally, here are some shots of different wildflowers, several of them in one small area near my house. How many can you identify now? Answers will be in the comment section below this blog post. 

Ælfwine

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

The Elephant

The suicide rate of veterans aged 18 to 34 steadily increased from 2006 to 2016, with a jump of more than 10 percent from 2015 to2016. That translates into 45 deaths per 100,000 veterans, the highest of any age group.

From Military Times: In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military. About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

One summer years ago I hung around a row of graves in one particular part of Pine Forest Cemetery in Lauderdale County. I was between semesters of teaching, and when depression hit me, that’s where I’d go.

That sounds a lot more morbid than it really was, although, yeah, it WAS a little morbid, I guess. I had a reason, such as it was, for being there: My younger brother, with whom I’d been very close both in age and in terms of our relationship, had died unexpectedly. And even knowing “he” wasn’t there (his actual self), still, it brought some peace to me to sit on the ground and think about him.

My parents eventually ended up reposing next to his grave, but that was years down the road. In the meantime, I sat and thought about Jack and looked around at the other graves nearby, wondering idly about some of them.

Long before those days, I’d been told that some of my forebears were laid to rest at Pine Forest, and as it turned out, not far from my brother’s grave; so I read their statistics and noticed that my great-great-grandfather William “Billy” Skinner had died on Christmas Day in 1885 (if you can believe things on grave markers, which is sometimes not the case).

That brought to mind something a relative had mentioned in passing, a bit of information I’d stuffed into my head and had more or less forgotten: “Billy Skinner committed suicide.”

This is a harder-than-usual post to write because of the topic I’m covering. When occasionally you hear of somebody taking his own life, inevitably you also eventually hear, “I just don’t understand how someone could do that.”

I do.

I’m not going to try to explore today an average person’s depths or sources of depression; but as I wrote at the first of this post, there IS one area I’m looking at, and that is the soldier’s life when he comes home. 

I’ve mentioned before that my father was about ten years old when his grandfather Andrew Jackson Alawine died: he lived down the road from him, knew him well, recalled what happened around the time he died, and told me when I was a teenager. (I refer you to my 6th post of this blog, in which I shared what he recounted to me.)

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html 

My father said his grandfather Andrew never had discussed the time he served in the Civil War, and yet in those last days of his life—after his wife Lucretia died—he relived some of the battles and was out of his head.

My daughters’ grandfather Edwin Thead never told his children or grandchildren anything much about the time he spent in Europe towards the end of World War II. It was a brief period of service for him, but he just wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen.

Like Andrew Jackson Alawine, Billy Skinner had served in the Civil War, as the records below show.

Two of his brothers—Calvin J. and Marion F.—had also served, and Calvin had died on May 22, 1862 in Danville, VA. Billy was “paroled” (i.e., surrendered) at Vicksburg in July 1863. He’d married Susan Kelly in 1854. When she died in about 1872 or so, family tradition says he himself carved her headstone from wood. Being a master carpenter, he would’ve been able to do that.

He married Maggie Petty Mayo Sweeney, my great-great-grandmother, sometime around 1874. Their large extended family included half-siblings and step-siblings; they lived in Kemper County by then, apparently fairly prosperous, as Billy was listed a “mechanic in wood shop” (more than simply “carpenter”) on the 1880 census.

And yet…in 1885 he committed suicide, at a usually joyous time of year.

And then there is this:

(Thanks to Jan Boyles Wilson of Colorado.)

Just to help you recall who this person was: His father James and James’s brother Alexander were in South Alabama and South Mississippi in the early 1840’s. Several of Alex’s sons served in the Civil War, as did James’s. You can review all that history in this post.

http://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-civil-war-and-theads.html

On Alex’s side, two sons—George W. and Columbus (“Lum”)—came home to carry on the Thead name. George lived to be a good old age, but Lum apparently died around 1869 or 1870, shortly after he returned from his own service, during which he spent time in a prison camp known for hard conditions. Lum had been discharged earlier, in 1862, because of “incipient consumption” (i.e., tuberculosis), but he rejoined and was captured, as the above post shows.

On the first-cousin side of the Thead family, over in Clarke County, Mississippi, James’s son Hamilton “Hamp” returned scarred from the Civil War—not so much physically as emotionally. His brothers William Alexander and John (and maybe another brother, Richmond) had died in the war. All three men had been in the same 13th Mississippi Regiment, so it’s possible Hamp was near them when they died. A record shows that he himself was listed as a “good and brave” soldier, but then he also “suffered a prisoner to escape” and served some kind of time in the equivalent of military jail.

He raised a family in Mississippi after the War. And then he committed suicide. He was buried on a hill overlooking the Buccatunna Creek, at the back of his property.

And the newspaper said, “The cause of his rash act is a mystery.”

Today we’d call it PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It doesn’t just affect the military, but we associated it more with soldiers.

There’s no way to make this post light-hearted; I would never even try. Perhaps, instead, looking back at these men who didn’t have the diagnosis of “PTSD” and suffered, sometimes for years, men whose families maybe only knew they were dealing with inner demons unimaginable to the everybody else—perhaps we just need to bear in mind that they have indeed “seen the elephant” where we have not.

Ælfwine