Boomerang photos

I grew up with few pictures from my mother’s side of the family. Her parents, Emory Morse and Lois Rhodes, had been near-neighbors as children in Wareham, Massachusetts. They divorced when my mother was eight. Mother had no further contact with her father until she was 40.

After my mother’s college graduation, her mother and step-father, a teacher working for the U.S. State Department, announced they had accepted a three-year-assignment in Ethiopia. Mother declined the opportunity to go with them. Instead, she accepted her first job as a clinical instructor and moved into a small apartment. Her family home in Maywood, New Jersey, was rented, with all contents of the house placed in a storage warehouse. Three months later, the warehouse burned – a total loss.

All my mother had from her childhood were a few framed photos and a couple of snapshots in her purse. Consequently, I had scant evidence of what my grandmother looked like as a young woman and no idea of what my grandfather looked like. A desire to find pictures fueled many of my early research endeavors.

Typical for the era, my grandmother (Nana) wrote letters, every few weeks, to her brothers who remained in Wareham. Fortunately, Mother’s cousins were savers, with boxes of correspondence from their parents, and they shared their bounty with me. Nana’s letters always included captioned snapshots and sometimes wallet-sized pictures of my mother and her two sisters. That helped fill the void, but it was not enough. I wondered if someone kept studio pictures of significant events like Nana’s graduation from nursing school.

Fortunately, Mother’s cousins were savers, with boxes of correspondence from their parents, and they shared their bounty with me.

As a 1929 graduate of the Truesdale Hospital School of Nursing in Fall River, Nana always carried that distinction proudly, enhanced by my mother earning her R.N. from the same place 25 years later. Both were saddened when Truesdale closed. While no nursing school yearbooks existed, I felt certain Nana had a portrait taken in her nursing cap.

An instructor from my mother’s student days suggested that I contact Alma Andrews Robinson, who was about the same age as Nana. Mrs. Robinson responded enthusiastically to my telephone query by telling me that she and another of my grandmother’s classmates, Emily Bellman, now shared a home. They invited me to visit. Alma gave me an inscribed graduation picture of Nana, still in its original studio folder: “With Love, To My Darling Pal, Rhodesie.” Emily also gave me a newspaper clipping with the photos of all that year’s graduating nurses, all of whom were living in 1982.

With his late entry into my life, my maternal grandfather never quite took to be being called “Grandpa” and asked that I call him by his first name, Emory. His youth had largely been erased. I hoped I could find a similar studio picture for him. He graduated from Wareham High School in 1925. Again, no yearbooks, but possibly a formal picture. Emory supplied the names of several school chums, but my queries revealed they did not graduate with him.

Meanwhile, I pursued another strategy: A cousin had given me a copy of Wareham’s 1974 street directory, which not only listed occupants’ name but their date of birth! I made a list of all the individuals born in 1906 or 1907, then narrowed it to three or four names on people likely to have been one of my grandfather’s high school classmates. The second person I called, Madeline Proctor Pierce, remembered Emory fondly. She thought “somewhere” in her home she had his picture but needed time to search. I gave her my address in Vermont. Several weeks a large envelope arrived with Emory’s picture, also in its original studio folder—this one inscribed, “Your friend, Morsie.” What a thrilling revelation to see the youthful Emory for the first time.

When I showed the picture to Emory he quipped, “I went to high school with him!”

Little did either of my grandparents realize that the photos they gave to friends would make their way back to me more than fifty years later. Even better than a boomerang returning to its owner!

Now having a sense of what Lois and Emory looked like, their faces jumped out to me from uncaptioned snapshots pasted in scrapbooks, like the one below from about 1922:

This picture now lives as poignant memento of my grandparents’ shared childhood. One of genealogy’s most rewarding consequences is our assembling of disconnected past shards into a recognizable mosaic.