Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Aunt Marion -- Post 323 for (Not So) Wordless Wednesday

I am posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they aren't "Wordless" - I am incapable of having a wordless post!

Here is a photograph from the Seaver/Carringer family photograph collection from my 40 years of photo albums, boxes and piles of family photographs:




This photograph is of Marion Frances (Seaver) (Braithwaite) Hemphill (1901-2000), my father's oldest sister, one of my aunts who contributed so much to my knowledge of the Seaver family.

This photograph was taken in 1999, probably by her daughter, Nancy, in Clinton, South Carolina.  

Some of the family photographs that I have used on Wordless Wednesday over the years were from Aunt Marion's photo album, which Nancy kindly sent me after her death.  There were previously unseen photos of my Seaver family, but also of other related families.  

Aunt Marion was a teacher in the 1940s and 1950s in central Massachusetts, and one of the products of her career was a Seaver genealogy typescript, apparently created from the Westminster, Massachusetts town history book and family information.  This was a big help to me when I started doing genealogical research.

Marion visited San Diego several times in the 1970s and early 1980s to see her brother and our family.  I took the opportunity in 1982 to sit down with her with my cassette tape recorder and asked her questions about the family.  I eventually transcribed the tape and shared some of her observations and commentary with the extended family in my family newsletter.  Linda and I visited Marion once in Clinton, South Carolina, in 1999 (I think!).  She was in a care facility then, but was still as spunky and sharp as ever.  We had a great time, and we got to meet Nancy and her husband for the first time.

It struck me as I was writing this post that Marion lived in every year of the 20th century.  She missed the first 312 days (born on 9 November 1901) and the last 300 days of 2000 (died 6 March 2000), but she lived the 35,912 days in between.  Think about the progress she saw in transportation (horse and buggy to airplanes and spaceships), communication (newspaper and telephones to radio, television and the Internet), and household conveniences (indoor plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, washing machines, microwave ovens, etc.).

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/09/aunt-marion-post-323-for-not-so.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What an incredible life she must have lived to have seen all 35,000+ of those days...that's truly amazing! Not to mention she has a great sense of style. It's great that you took the time to interview Marion as well, that's so important in creating a family legacy.


storycall.us