The Past and the Future.....

A cousin, Rosemarie, shared this photo a few years back.  She has passed away a year ago.  The photo is of her baby brother Gary.  He lives today in an institution with autism difficulties.  The photo then is about 60 years ago and it is taken next to the Pacific Ocean.  The finding of this photo is a special one to me as there is so much family stories in all that is showing in the photo.  My Grandfather Charlie and my grandmother Grace lived in Iowa in a very small town.  They took the train to Washington State to see new grandson and the grand daughter Rosemarie who would have been three years old. Their son Donald and his wife Eileen lived out in Washington.  Eileen was a war bride being a full Brit.

Charlie and Grace look so out of place being on the beach.  I doubt that they had ever visited the coast before then. Living in Iowa they would not have had a car nor would they have made the drive.  The two of them were at the end of their years having raised 10 children and living some very hard times as farmers. They lost a farm from a bad economy and struggled on a smaller farm to keep food on the table.

The picture was taken in early 1949 when Gary was born.  My grandfather died that same year.  I never knew him as I was born in the next year.  I have a few select photos of him and heard stories of how nice of a guy that he was.  This photo is a great one of Charles (Charlie) Thomas Burgus. It is one of my Grace Elizabeth Turner Burgus and it does resemble her as I did know her for another 15 years since the photo was taken.

My second and last photo shows thing in my life in the future.  Our son and  his wife live near Bar Harbor, Maine.  This is a photo from Cadillac Mountain looking down on the Atlantic shore line. Our son and his wife love it here as they hike the trails and camp along the coast line.  We are so landlocked here and thing they are so fortunate to live there.

Others are answering the call of posting Sepia Saturday articles following the seashore theme. Check them out at the SEPIA SATURDAY  site.

Fishing.....

A couple of G.I.s trying their hand at fishing with the local kids. The place is Belgium where my dad was stationed before he went to the front to fight in WW II.  The bridge looks like a temporary one after the original was damage by bomb warfare.

Crossing the river by boat because the bridges are gone. My dad was a farm boy in southern Iowa where there were bodies of water for boats. He then had a fascination for them and was fortunate to by a fishing boat is his older years thirty years after being in the war.

My father is exploring another vessel in the same area of Belgium. I see there isn’t a sail to go with the mast. I like the little roof piece that is covering a portion of an opening of the boat.

My dad took a shot of one of the smaller boats in which he two traveled in to come over to Europe. The smaller the boat the worse it is to get sea sickness while being on the ocean.  He was extremely sick from that crossing in 1944.








The theme was a boy with a wheel barrow with fish to eat in it.  My extension to things in the water is a far stretch but I really wanted to share something today. WW ll era may have been in the same time frame of the little boy at the harbor.

Others share photos on their Sepia Saturday’s blogs.  Click on the HERE to go see other sharing of photos and words.

It’s the Dress......

It may be a wedding dress but I have no proof.  I do know that it is a dress that is duplicate of my Grandmother Brooks’s wedding dress.  The layers of the ribbons allowed the woman to shorten it to make be a custom fit. They could hem them up into the inside or the could cut it. The photo was taken in the late1800’s and was from a set of family albums.

I have two albums from a house that my father demolished in order to build an new home. The photos from the family have given me clues that the house was built in the late 1800’s.  The town was Osceola, Iowa established in 1870s or earlier. From the photos I have found a dominate name of Webster in which there are many of the family buried in the town cemetery.

I have a photo of this in a rectangular format but can not pull it from my Sepia Saturday posts. This is my Grandmother Mable Zella Wheeler who married Leroy Brown in July of 1913. She became my Grandma Brown. Leroy Brown died in 1937 and a few years later my Grandmother remarried a widower and became Mrs. Oscar Brooks.

My Grandma had a photographer help her to get that ribboned hat to look good. I still have the ribbon hat and wedding dress which I am planning to give to a younger first cousin soon.

Other photos from the album gave me images of dresses but not necessarily wedding dresses. The style of dress does make it look to be a newer styled dress with the drapery on the skirt.

It is definitely not a wedding dress but is at the photo studio with all of there street corner props.  Probably this is more of the early 1900s. Things are more complicated with this dress than the original ribbon dress that I started out with at the top photo. The diamond shapes and patterns at the bottom of the double ruffled makes it more complicated in design. In the photo albums I did notice that the studios have lots of combinations of props in which for them to take photos.  I have a couple that have a stairway included.

The last photo I share today is one of a couple standing on the fake street corner. The dark colored dresses were popular but the guy even has his top coat on along with his hat. The drapery on her dress is a little bit more complicated as the style developed.

Visit others who are following this same theme today of Sepia Saturday  by clicking here. Thanks for stopping by today.