52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 18 Prompt – Up Close
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| Grandfather Andreas Krikau With Unknown Baby. |
I have accumulated many family pictures
over the years from family. One of my pet peeves is a picture
without any identification. Or worse it has a cryptic message that
only the photographer would know who they are. For example one of my
photos has this inscription on the back; “The Three Musketeers -
1944”. I recognize my grandmother McLaughlin in the middle of the
Musketeers, but I have no clue who the other two are. Are they
relatives or friends? I suspect friends and I really would like to
know why she wrote that on the back. There has to be a story behind
the name.
Unfortunately many of the photos end up
scanned to my computer with the title of “Unknown Relative from
Family” (and I insert the family that the picture came from).
One of the unidentified pictures I have
was of my great-grandfather Andreas Krikau holding a baby sitting on the
bumper of a car. I knew my great-grandfather but which baby was he holding. This was one of many pictures sent to me from my
Aunt Phyllis (my mother's half brother's wife) after Uncle Wally
died. The photos were in a grocery bag with the randomness of a
shuffled deck. The picture was a scanned photo and not the original.
In this particular picture I started to
look at clues in the picture to date it. If I was into cars I might
have been able to know what the make of the car was and its date. But
alas that was not helpful to me. After many passes it finally
dawned on me to zoom in on the license plate to find the year. Up
close I was able to establish this was a Manitoba plate with the date
of 1941. Through basic sleuthing I was able to identify the baby as
my older sister, Betty. Sorry Betty if I am telling age secrets but
this really helped me make the identification.
This picture did look familiar to me.
I have received hundreds if not thousands of pictures over the past
decade or so. I scan and place them in my appropriate family file
and often don't go back to it until I am working on that family.
Once I discovered the baby was my sister I looked in her family photo
file and found several other similar pictures of her in different
combinations of family. They were wearing the same clothes and the
baby was wearing the same white dress.
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| Four Generation - Mary McLaughlin (grandma to Betty), Maria Krikau (great-grandmother), Vivian Peters (mother) & Betty |
Working from these additional photos I figured out that they came to me from my mom's photo album
that my younger sister sent me a long time ago. I searched the scanned photo album and found this group of photos and on the bottom of one
of the photos is “Grama & Grandad & Betty”. I have no
doubt now that this is Betty. The white dress made me think that
this was a special occasion especially since the great-grandparents who at
this time lived in Chicago were in Saskatoon.
Infant – white dress
– family photos probably means a baptism.
I remember that Betty had let me scan
her baptismal booklet. Scanning doesn't always mean that I
thoroughly read the document. I found the scanned copy and closely read and inspected each page of her baptismal booklet and I
found that Betty's mom had written a note on the last page of the booklet that I had missed.
It tied all this together.
It does not usually work out this well
in trying to identify photos. In this case by looking up close to
the date on the license plate I started to piece it together.
Further I found on closer inspection of Betty's baptismal booklet
there was a note from mom that confirmed and gave more intimate details of
that day.
There is more to the mystery that I can't explain and didn't notice until writing this blog. Notice I said the plate was a "Manitoba" plate. At this time my great-grandparents and all the great aunts & uncles were already living in Chicago. I do not know whose Manitoba car it was!
Wendy
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