Had the chance for a quick family trip and, amidst the visiting, I got a few old pictures.

This is my mother’s father. He died just after I was born, and so I know him through stories and pictures. Hard to imagine your grandfather ever looked like this, isn’t it?

Here is his father, W.K., on the far left:

Now I have a picture (or a scan of a picture) of my great-grandfather as a child. The man next to W.K. is his father, W.J. , my great-great-grandfather.

W.J. was born in 1860 and died in 1948. He might have had memories of the Civil War, definitely Reconstruction and probably read all about World War II in his local paper. Based on W.K.’s birthday, you can put that photograph as circa 1910.

The above dates are from Tidwell’s The Frank and Jesse James Saga. The book changes the family narrative somewhat. Prior to researching that text for this post, the thought was that there was an adoptive relationship. But, the book has a written family history that indicates that W.J., the older man in the above picture, was a cousin of the James boys. W.J. was orphaned as an infant (his father died in a Civil War prison camp and his mother died soon after) and adopted by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Joshua James, was the uncle of Frank and Jesse James.

Moving a generation or two into the future, here’s a picture I’ve had for some time:

That very tall man young man in the background is my grandfather. The woman to his left is my grandmother. Their kids, my mother and uncle, are in the front center. The older couple are my mother’s father’s parents, my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, on the far right, looked that way until the day she died four decades later. In 1995, she became the oldest ever graduate from the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters was the youngest graduate, in the 1960s.) My great-grandfather, the oldest gentleman in the picture above, is the kid on the far left of the previous, ancient picture.

On the other side of the family, here’s a picture of my maternal grandmother’s father:

That’s me on the right, and my cousin on the left. She’s all grown up, and has three kids who are now older than she is in that picture. I doubt she remembers him at all.

That building is still standing at my grandparent’s home. I have two or three scant memories of this great-grandfather, his home and the stories about others’ memories. Research on this side of the family isn’t as well developed, but can be traced back to a few family names I’ve never heard of elsewhere. Alas, there are no ties to outlaw folk heroes.

I love old pictures and the stories they whisper.