52 Ancestors in 2022 - Week 3: Favorite Photo

It's week 3 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. This week the prompt is 'Favorite Photo'! 

I've done this one before, but that's okay. I have lots of favorite photos! You can see one of my previous favorites here. This week I am going to share another photo of my Grandma Susie.

 I love this photo. I don't know when it was, but I envision it as being early spring. I imagine the girls getting out into the warm sunshine for the first time after a long winter. They look so happy and like they are having so much fun! Girls just want to have fun! The truth is that I only know that the photo was taken in 1920 sometime. My grandmother would have been 18 or 19, depending on when the photo was snapped. She had only been in the United States for about nine years at that point. (That is her handwriting on the photo.) I love the detail with the horse and buggy in the background!

I also don't know where the photo was taken. It looks to be a rural area. It could be Missouri or Illinois or Michigan. When Grandma arrived in the United States as child, her family settled in Peoria, Illinois. By 1920 her mother had died and her father had a farm in Branch, Michigan. I don't know if Grandma moved to the farm with him. I know she worked in a cap factory in St. Louis when she was a young single woman. That was before she married my grandfather in St. Louis in 1923. So this could be a rural area in any of those states—or someplace completely different!

The other young woman in the photo is Lennie Stephen. I don't know anything about Lennie except that she was a friend to my grandmother. I remember Grandma talked about taking the train to Mexico to with a friend. I don't know if Lennie was that friend. I also don't know when it was that Grandma took the train. She did say that she took it for weekend jaunts. I assume the friends were escaping from the big city for a weekend. And yes, I thought taking a train from St. Louis all the way to Mexico, especially more than once, was a little far. But it was the early 1900s, so trains were how people traveled. THEN Grandma told me her friend was in Mexico—MISSOURI!!

In any event, I don't know who Lennie is. I do have other pictures of Lennie in my collection. SO...if you know Lennie, or she is in your tree, please get in touch. You can use the 'Contact Me' tab at the top of this page. I'd love to learn more about Lennie and to share photos with you!