Family, frozen in time

— After all this time, you’d think I’d get used to it, but looking for the first time at the faces of people who were photographed a century ago or more still unsettles me.

With few exceptions, it is to gaze upon strangers. Why must they look so unfamiliar and so inscrutable? OK, so they are strangers; that’s a given going into the exercise. But they’re also kinfolks, blood relatives however many generations removed, and something about them ought to be identifiable as such.

It’s possible that responsibility for this goes right back to those few exceptions, most of which came shortly after I got serious about this genealogy stuff. Among the first photographs that newly found relatives shared during the early days of this endeavor provided my first glimpses of my father’s father as a young man (whom I’d known only as an old man) and my father’s mother’s mother (who’d died long before I was born). The resemblance that I had never been able to detect between my father and his father was startlingly apparent, andmy grandmother had been the spitting image of her own mother.

Maybe these two exciting discoveries set my expectations onto the wrong path because since then a number of ancestral photos have come my way and usually I have found little recognizable in them.

Of course, if you study a person’s countenance long enough, even one frozen in time, you’re bound to see a revelatory flicker, or at least the possibility of one. If only you could see it in profile, or as one expression in a series, or as something other than a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

I’m not complaining, mind you. We weren’t much for taking pictureswhen I was growing up. Mama swore she was going to make Daddy go with her to the mall and sit still for a formal portrait-it would have been their first-for their 50th wedding anniversary, but he didn’t live that long. I mention this just in case you or someone you love is thinking along these same lines. Life isn’t always as long as you want it to be.

Anyway, most of what I’ve accumulated is thanks to the generosity of people who are big on taking pictures or at least preserving those they’ve inherited.

Quite out of the blue, the wife of a first cousin four or five times removed wrote to ask whether I’d like to see a photograph of my great-grandfather’s sister’s daughter. Considering that I’d never even seen a photo of my great-grandfather, I jumped at it. Which is whatput me in mind of what I was talking about at the top of this column.

Understand, I’d only ever seen one photo of my mother’s father, so when looking upon a Puckett ancestor’s face in an old photograph, all I had for comparison was what I knew of the people in two generations, my mother’s and my own. I’ve studied the photos my benefactor sent over and over, and darned if I can find a resemblance to any of us, not even a flicker.

Still, you never know how two parental sets of genes are going to bedivvied up. Their kinship is obvious in a more recently acquired photograph of my mother’s grandfather, father and uncles, and their resemblance to my own uncles and more than a few of my cousins is stunning.

Which reminds me: I received an early Christmas present this year, a copy of a copy of the only known photograph of my mother’s parents. I never knew my grandfather-he died a decade before I was born-and for many, many years knew only this image of him, for the photograph hung in a big oval frame on my grandmother’s wall in my childhood. I am hoping to find a vintage frame so that the copy can hang on my wall in my dotage.

Having received this early Christmas gift, it occurs to me that we’re entering the family season, a perfect time for keeping a camera near athand.

You know, the first time we went through my late Cousin Ruth’s trove of family photographs together, I was surprised-OK, a little nonplused-to find that a number of them had been taken at cemeteries on the occasion of a funeral. The longer we pored overthem, the more impressed I was that someone had cared enough to take pictures of them while they were alive and dressed in their Sunday best; saddened, too, because of the circumstances.

I’m sure that the Thanksgiving before would have been a better day for pictures however those gathered around the table had been dressed.

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. Today’s column was based on one that ran on Nov. 23, 2008.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 11/24/2010

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