Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Family Photographs - Post 54: Watermelon feed in 1916

I'm posting old family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

This photograph is from my grandfather's photo album that I scanned during Scanfest in January:


The information on the back of this picture is that it is taken in Alpine (CA) in 1916. Nothing else, including the identity of the people in the photograph.

The only people that I can positively identify are Della (Smith) Carringer, my great-grandmother, in the white dress in back of the small table holding the watermelon slices, and my grandfather, Lyle Carringer, directly in back of Della. Abigail (Vaux) Smith, Della's mother, may be the lady two persons to the left of Della with the hat and apparent veil (mosquito net?), but I cannot tell for sure. Austin Carringer is not in this picture, so he may have taken the picture.

Look how intent some of these people are addressing their watermelon slice. The little boy to the right of the table is almost done with his.

The Carringer family had a wide circle of friends, so a look at the 1920 census may reveal some people in Alpine that they knew (checking with identified people in this photo collection and Della's 1929 Journal). Or they may have gone to Alpine just for a picnic. The men are all dressed in shirts and ties and the women in long dresses. I guess this was typical of the times.

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