Friday, September 2, 2011

Back from a Long Break

It has been quite a while since I have posted here.  My vacation was hard to give up this year, especially with our "baby girl" home from college.   So this blog took a 'back seat', if you will.

While on our trip to visit family this summer I was able to find some boxes of old family photos and memorabilia that I had not seen before.   I have been spending quite a bit of time going through the items lately, and find myself wishing my parents were still here to tell me the significance of the things I am looking at.

Until I can get back into the groove of posting I have decided to post a couple of the photos I have found that relate to my blog.  This photo, taken in 1899, stood out among the papers I was going through :

It is a picture of my Grandmother, (standing in the white dress),  and her family about a year after they traveled in a covered wagon from Tennessee to settle in Oklahoma Territory.  At this time their home may have still been an earthen dugout.  (See my post on June 15th, Dugout - No Diamond. )   Seeing this photo makes it even harder for me to imagine this group thriving under those circumstances.

This second photo is also particularly interesting to me:



It is an old newspaper clipping that shows my Grandmother's Uncle (her father's brother) and his children on their Oklahoma Territory claim near present day Cheyenne in the year 1898 - the year my Grandmother arrived.   You can make out their  dugout rooftops in the distance.  My Grandmother grew up on a nearby farm, so this picture helps me envision what her life may have been like while living "underground".

3 comments:

Nate Maas said...

Mary, so nice to have you back posting. The dugout life is a hard one for me to imagine, particularly hard for the women who would be inside more of the day.

Just Stuff From a Boomer said...

I've missed you too.

This is one stern looking family. I think that is the type of person that made a trip like theirs successful.

Pioneering is not for the faint of heart. I cannot begin to imagine what living in a dugout would feel like. I've saw one on a trip through the badlands and the Rockies. It was pretty small so your familie's was either bigger or they lived very close together.

Unknown said...

What a beautiful family picture! Your great-grandmother looks tired, life must have been hard for her. Did all the children make it into adulthood?

I did't know people where still living in a dugout in the US so recently (I know the first settlers on Manhattan lived that way in the early 1600s, but I didn't know this still happened in the early 1900s).