At the margin

One of the joys of old photographs is the occasional detail, the one that hovers at the margin, away from the central feature of the image. Looking through one of my grandmother’s albums – helpfully marked “Vol. 1,” although I’m not sure there are any subsequent ones in the series – I’m struck by the horses and cars (even the occasional ostrich) that coexist with the people peopling the photographs. My grandmother’s family was considered very “horsey,” and they were happy to be associated with their powerful cars – and I think there is a bit of a story to be found in these images.

The earliest image shows my grandmother and great-aunt[1] riding an ostrich in California. It is marked 1915, when Aunt Theo was nine and Grandmother was about seven. My great-grandparents[2] used to go out west in the winter with my great-great-grandparents,[3] and I’ve seen letters about their visits to the Banning and Patton cousins in Pasadena. For my grandmother, a native of Boston, these California trips must have seemed quite exotic, and the ostrich ride seems like the icing on the cake.

One of my favorite photos of the Ayer family is this one, showing my great-grandparents with their daughters visiting Baja California. The photographer has helpfully provided signage to advertise his services.

This photo, from 1916, shows my grandmother riding Greylegs for a fancy dress event at the New Riding Club in Boston.

The next image dates from the late 1910s, I’d say, or early 1920s. My grandmother has captioned it “Mama, at some point in her career,” which suggests they had a fairly sophisticated parent-child relationship.

In 1924, my great-grandmother took her daughters and a friend (Edith Woodward) to Europe. Here they are in Venice, and my grandmother’s focus is on the handsome gondolier: she has captioned the photo “Mama and Edith in their gondola … with Giovanni at the helm.”

Two years later, my grandmother visited France with a chaperone. While she took a number of photos of the group in which she traveled, my grandmother was careful to photograph their chauffeur (“Albert at Carnac”) and their Hispano-Suiza touring car: “The Hispano at Carnac 1926.”

Finally, here is another image of my great-grandmother, identified by her initials: “T.I.A. up.” As a general rule, the photos in this album contain a member of the Ayer family, a horse or a dog, and – as we’ve seen here – some sort of motor vehicle/ostrich/gondola. The thing at the margin has moved to center stage.

Notes

[1] Anne Beekman Ayer (1908–1947) and Theodora Ayer (1905–1996).

[2] Charles Fanning Ayer (1865–1956) was married to Sara Theodora Ilsley 1904–45 and to Anne Phillips in 1946.

[3] Frederick Ayer (1822–1918) was married to Cornelia Wheaton 1858–78 and to Ellen Barrows Banning in 1884; a complicated series of marriages connected the Ayer, Banning, and Patton families, even before Frederick and Ellen’s daughter Beatrice married George Smith Patton, Jr., in 1910.