Another Era

[eregyrn]

While looking for something else, I dragged out an old photo album that my Mom gave to me. She actually gave one to my brother, as well, and she went to the trouble to take a lot of the *really old* family photos and get some of them color-photocopied on photo-paper for us, so that we would have them. This reminded me that I'd really like to make another copy of my favorite of those old photos, so that I could put it in a frame and put it up somewhere in my house. So I scanned it in at a high resolution, and that made me realize that I could share it with you.

So here are my maternal great-grandparents, Thomas McKeefery and Frances Dugan, in 1883, "at the beach":



(I think you can click on it for a larger version.) What I love about this picture, aside from its age, is the casualness of the setting and the poses and the clothing. Yeah, it's against a fakey painted backdrop rather than on the real beach. But I actually love that a lot too, because it makes me think about them saying on purpose that they want to go to some photo studio for a pic of the two of them in their bathing costumes. I love the way the top of his outfit matches her stripey stockings, which are AWESOME. And I love how I can look at them and see the familial resemblences -- my mother looks a little bit like her, and my mother's brother Leonard looked a little like him.

Plus, I just love having this beach-oriented photo of them, because he is the one who built the little shore-house (a shack, really) that my mother is living in today, down on Long Beach Island, back in 1911 when there were hardly any buildings on the island at all, but he worked for the railroad in Philadelphia, and the railroad had just laid track down to LBI and wanted to encourage people to go there for their vacations, so they sold land really cheap to their employees and helped them build.

They look like real people who had fun sometimes, and I love that.

Comments

[starglyph.livejournal.com]

That's really very cool. You're fortunate to have that and the history behind it. Make sure you write it down somewhere!

Having the painted backdrop is great. Often, they would have these actually available at a beach. It prevented blurry movements that would be in a real background.

I cannot even imagine having to wear that outfit in the water :-)

[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

I can kind of imagine it. I think part of the key was that women at the time probably weren't doing a lot of very energetic swimming in the water anyway, or going very deep. More like paddling/wading and stuff.

I think you're right about the painted backdrop. I can certainly believe that this was taken when they were actually down at the shore. I have pictures of their daughter, my grandmother, actually *on* the beach with my grandfather and their siblings and friends -- but of course, that's a good 40 years later, probably. (She was a very late baby.)

My Mom actually did a fairly good job of documenting all of the oldest photos. I think she might have done it when one of her mother's siblings was still alive (because my grandmother died in '77, and I don't know if Mom had started documenting that early). Almost all of the really old photos have who's who carefully written on the back (sometimes, on the *front* :P ), and in the front of the album Mom put a typewritten page detailing all of the names and marriage dates and births and deaths and all. (So I know that Thomas's father was the one who emigrated from Ireland in 1866, for example; although we don't seem to have similar information for Frances's parents.)

I've always found family history really fascinating. Apparently so did my Mom, thank goodness. :) (We have some pics from Dad's side of the family, but far fewer that go back that far.)