Runs in the Family

Yesterday’s photograph beside the long, sweeping lines of a 1930s Buick is turning out to be just one of many such automobile portraits in the collection of material I've inherited from my aunt.

Oh, there were people in the pictures, too. But I imagine there was one photographer who only had eyes for those gleaming steel machines.

I was going to include another candid shot, yesterday, of my mother and aunt during their later childhood, standing next to a car with—I presumed—their father. After scanning the original, though, as I magnified the subject to trim the border, I realized that the man in the photo wasn’t my grandfather, after all. Apparently, someone else in the family was a great fan of those handsome automobiles.

Looks like this picture will be the one to initiate a collective effort to identify the people in all these unlabeled photographs. Some of the pictures of my aunt and mother as younger children were labeled, thankfully—actually, labeled quite precisely, with each girl’s age, down to the month. But as the years wore on, perhaps my grandmother had other things more pressing on her mind than labeling snapshots of dozens of cars (and her own children and husband). After all, she knew who they were.

So, off I go, sending emails with attached photos to likely prospects among my relatives, in hopes that someone will remember a face from over seventy years ago.

That will be a tall order to fill at this late date.


Photograph, above right: Sisters Patsy Ruth Davis to the left and Sara Jacqueline Davis to the right of an unidentified relative in the late 1930s.