Evry Kiss You Miss

Ahhhh…summer! A time that blends well with genealogy research. Or a time when some researchers set aside their quest for family past and pursue the celebration of family now. It’s a time for some to gather the family and head to the nearest cemetery detour on their way to their long-awaited vacation destination.

Since last August, I’ve been making my way through a stack of memorabilia passed down through the Tully and Stevens families. Many of the items I’ve already posted here have been letters and photos of easily-identified family members as well as friends of the family.

But things get murkier as I work my way through the collection. I’m now to the point of finding pictures without names—or worse, names which I can’t place within the extended family picture no matter how I push, shove or jiggle those puzzle pieces.

For instance, from the era when it was popular to send family pictures embedded in a postcard format, I have a handful of photographs from a beachside resort in the Carolinas. Who these people are, I have no idea—except that they are somehow connected with our Tully family in Chicago.

Rather than give up and toss the mystery pieces, I’m going to follow the lead of orphan photograph caretakers such as Forgotten Old Photos or Family Photo Reunion or The Cabinet Card Gallery. I’m just going to post what I have, names known or not. Perhaps in the future, courtesy of a Google search, someone will find the picture, recognize a detail and help me with some clues.

In the meantime, it will give me the opportunity to continue pursuing my goal of getting all this material posted where it can be accessible and searchable. It can be in a place where others may benefit from it, too.

In honor of these lazy days of summer, I’m going to start tomorrow with the mystery series on my swimsuited friends.

And today, I’d like to start off with a postcard that someone in the Tully family must have purchased long, long ago in celebration of that never-changing summer sun. Never addressed nor received through the mail, it must have just been a whimsical reminder of something about the season—something found in a store, something bought to keep and enjoy. It bears a microscopic inscription on the margin of the reverse, “Copyright applied for, 1910, by P. D. Bacon, Chicago.”

On the face of the card, a handwritten explanation asserts:

Evry kiss you miss maks a Frekel.

Now I know why I’ve always mourned all those summertime freckles.