Faces of Long Ago..........

 

Standing on the corner, holding his hat, and spending time with his wife while having the photo taken. The photo comes from a big velvet photo album that was rescued from a rundown house in Osceola, Iowa.

I am thinking this is the same guy with the uniform of a Mason. It is a studio shot also.  I don't understand the Christian crosses on the sleeves and hat but the whole outfit is actually a standard suit with all the added accessories, making it look like a fancy coat. Maybe it is a different lodge that he belonged to as I know there were many of them in which whole families would join.

A young man sports a great mustache in a photo taken at the same photographers.

So this is not the same guy and  he is older.  The thing that I find fascinating is that it may be the same kind of tie. The attached earlobe of this guy makes him not related to the guy above him.  The above guy could have married into the family of this family.  I don't know if I will ever know.

I have lost my way from men with facial hair.  I will stop with this guy with his wife.  I do think he is the same guy as the first two photos at the top as his mustache and beard are so similar and this photo too was from the same album.  Judging from the age of the house in which this album was rescued, I think the time could be in the late 1800's. There was one calling card with a woman's name of Jackson.  I know that it is a long shot as the woman could be a sister to the women in the picture or a sister of the guy with the beard. I have yet to get to a web site to find out this family's name and the history of the people who lived there.  I see on other web sites that people like to use findagrave.com in this country and one can find out a lot about people by searching through the records of all those buried in cemeteries. I need to take one of the names from the album and seek out those buried in the Osceola cemetery.

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This Old House.............

The things that I like about a house is the exterior decoration. I know that they come in many shapes and sizes and the older the house in most cases means there is more character to the house.  My 109 year old house sucked me in for the buy because of the bay window.  It is far more decorated than the rest of the house but it does give it a special look to make the old farmhouse a styled house special.  In the background you can see a guys 1970's ranch style kitchen addition on a very old house that doesn't match the beauty of my bay window.

 

A four square styled farm house was built by my grandpa Burgus in the early 1900's.  The house still stands but was moved from it original site north of Murray, Iowa to a small town of Lorimor, Iowa. 

As an addition to the above house, here is the photo of my Grandpa and Grandma who built and lived in the house with their 10 children.  They are mostly grown here and my grandparents moved to a smaller house probably 20 years later after it was built.  They sold the farm and moved to another, in which they lost in the depression.

A diversion  from the theme is this house that must have been a church or a school and now is a personal residence.  It would cost a lot of money to restore it and I bet that they are doing it a little at a time.  This building sits in Maine.  It is on Mt. Dessert island near Bar Harbor, Maine.

An old house that had been abandoned for years.  It sat in the town of Osceola, Iowa. It had the appearance of a common house but the interior showed a lot of loving carpentry work.  The kitchen had many built in cupboards. The parlor had hand made paneling, each piece lovingly fitting together to make a wall full of 1800's paneling. The wrap around porch was probably well used.  The two chimneys tell me that the kitchen stove used the left chimney and the other end of the house was heated by wood burners. The house is gone now but the large tree is still standing.

My grandmother Burgus stands in front of the single story house in Murray, Iowa.   I can date this photo as my oldest brother was born in 1940.  The window is full of flowers and cactus and still was when I came around in the 50's.

The house still stands with the bay window that  held my grandmothers plants. It still has it's fancy porch with decorations. This was the last house that my grandparents lived in while the second house from the top was their first. The moved to two different farm houses before they came to live in town.

My maternal grandmother lived a block away from the house above, yes in Murray, Iowa.  My mom lived here with my Grandmother Brooks after graduating from high school and during her years of teaching country school. I have many family pictures taken from in front of this house. My Uncle Kenny stands in front of the house.  My reposted blog of last weeks Sepia Saturday shows on the first photo my two oldest brothers, when they were very young sitting outside on the ground in front of the porch.

The house still stands today also but one owner decided to tear off the second story and turned it into a 1950's Cape Cod looking house.

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