The house on the hill, big pine tree.......

My father bought this house on South Kossuth street in Osceola, Iowa.  It had been abandoned more years than I can guess. The property was willed to the Presbyterian Church in town and there it sat.
My dad had retired from farming and moved to town and decided to build a house.  He found this property and the rest was history.  In 1978 he build a ranch house on this site.  Thankfully he did not take the historic tree.

I have many things that my dad had pulled out of that upstairs. A couple of photo albums and loose photos like the one above.  I have a couple of things that will help me to identify the owners as there was a diary left in the house and some of the pictures have names on them. Very few have full last names but I really have not had time to work on it. 

This being a history blog and a non family history blog, I wanted to share this photo.  It reminds me of the early paintings done by Manet or Degas.  I like the clarity of the photo and the clothing.  I am assuming that these are some of the inhabitants of the house as the photographer was Swearingen of Osceola, Iowa.   I may not have the name correct as the S could be a T or an L.  I have watched a blogger friend in Minnesota dance around these old photos until she found out great details.  I will start dancing but at a later date.  I am thinking that this was taken in the middle 1800's or early 1900's.  Thanks for stopping in today.
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Faces in Iowa......week 27

Anyone who read this blog earlier today, I have had to go in and change it, correct it, as a first cousin of mine had most of the answers as to who they all were.

Grandpa and Grandma Burgus on a visit to Pearl and Mabel Henderson's.

This bundled up bunch is a recent discovery in a box of old photos. I don't know everyone but I date this photo in the early 1930's.  My Aunt Amye is in the foreground center with the belt. She was born in 1915.  I don't even know why the photo was taken as if there had been a special event.

I can see my Aunt Ruby, my dad's sister, on the left side with glasses.  On the right side, the man with the double breasted coat, is her husband Frank Henderson. Frank and Ruby Henderson had two children, first cousins to me, John Henderson and Joan Henderson Callison. They are not in this photo as I don't think they were born yet.

Most of the people in the photo are not my relatives but it is a photo of my grandparents visiting their daughter's, my Aunt Ruby, in-laws.  The women to the left of my Aunt is her mother in-law,  Mabel Henderson. Pearl Henderson, my Aunt's father-in-law is the man in back third man from the right. My Aunt Pauline Burgus and Uncle Carl Burgus is in the photo and one other man who is not identified.  The man on the far right is a man named Harmon Blanchard holding his daughter Helen.  Not a relative of mine but my aunt's in-laws. The little girl in front is an unknown. She could be an aunt to me, but it is not certain.

To help in the identity of my grandparents I cropped out a close view of Grandpa Charles Thomas Burgus and Grandma Grace Elizabeth Turner Burgus.  They had moved from a farm south of Murray and bought this house in Murray.

Editors correction.....

In this location was a picture of a house that I thought was the same house as seen above. I removed it as it was wrong. My first cousin Joan, the daughter of the Aunt Ruby I mentioned above corrected my insights and guess on the picture.  It turns out that the majority of the photo is of my Aunt Ruby's in-laws with a few of her brothers and sister-in-laws on my Burgus side of the family.  The house was located south of Murray, in the country, a few miles and was owned by my Aunt Ruby's in-laws.   They lost the house to the depression and had to move to another farm that they owned. This was very common at that time when you owned more than the times could allow you to afford.

To continue with my faces of Iowa theme, I wanted you to see this Daily Vacation Bible School class. It was my mom's class and she proudly writes on the back that they all had perfect attendance. It was taken in 1948 in front of the church's parsonage with the church build on the right.  My brother Rex would have been six years old and I believe he is the blond guy in bib overalls, second from the left. All of these  people are about 68 years old now.

Another earlier shot of rural Iowa would have been taken maybe ten to twenty years earlier.  I at first thought this was my mom's class that she taught in country school but the age of the photo may make it actually the age of her or her brothers in school which would have been in the 1925s or later. You can see the coal shed or out house in the background.

One last photo of my brother Ron squeezed in onto the lap of our cousin Jerry Ramsey. From my research of the ages of cousins, Jerry was  four years older than Ron, so it would make them one and five years old. The photo is taken in the town of Murray about four houses west of the Burgus's home.

This is my other Grandma Brooks home, mom's side of the family, in which Jerry's family rented the upstairs.  Because Jerry's parents Leonard and Amye Burgus Ramsey lived upstairs, my mom was introduced to my dad Jesse Burgus, Amye's brother.

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Sepia Saturday #26

I found another photo of my Uncle Kenny.  He always looks so cool in his photos.  He really was around way before James Dean.  That farm that this is taken at is a familiar background to a lot of my photos of that era.  I don't know where it is but I will ask my Uncle when I see him.  He is 93 years old now and lives in Murray, Iowa.  The place looks a lot junky and they were poor even though they have automobiles.  I don't have any way to date this photo but I bet car people can date the car for me.

I keep finding photos for the first time in my life and it is exciting. I am the young one in this photo. My mom lost a child right after I was born, so photos of me were very few and far between. I bet there are a dozen in existence and all of them are blurry. The photo says that it was taken at the Ray Woods farm. I cleared up the photo a little with photoshop so the two guys on the right look better than the original.  I didn't come out of the fog.

By my age in the photo I am assuming this is 1951. I was born in March of 1950 and this looks like a year later.  It is taken on the farm where my Dad was renting the land.  If it is 1951 that makes the first guy, Ron, in the hat, at the age of 10.  My brother Rex is probably 9 who is holding me.  My brother Dwight would be 4 in this picture.

My mom liked to tell the story that since my folks were share cropping to pay their rent. The landowners Ray Woods and wife said that Larry was also half their boy too.

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