Old Family Photos

[CaddmannQ]

After seeing John's thread I decided to post a few old family photos as its own topic. I haven't tracked down everything, but hope to post a few more.

My Mom's folks were German piano makers in the old country tradition. There was a Co-op or Guild and they had financial interest in the business, until WW1 started.

They moved from Germany to Cincinnati, and the Kaiser probably took the piano factory to make guns etc.

These photos go back to about 1910 in Cincinnati.


They wound up doing woodwork in Covingtown, that would adorn the brownstone towers of Cincinnati. Their son (my great grandpa) worked for the Post Office, and became a successful brewer, building a big house on the hill above town.

My dad's paternal side folks were starving Irish farmers, and there are no known photographs of their early existence. They married into a Scott-English family, and came to New York in the late eighteen hundreds.

This is Dad's mom & unknown cousin, taken in the 60s. We stayed in their tiny house, in snowy Upstate New York at the edge of town & the Appalachian Foothills.

The infamous Johnstown Flood was just a few miles down the road from there. Here's her house, my cousins, uncle and aunts, in the 1990s.

That is Grandma on the lower left, also in her 90s.
Grandpa was a line supervisor at GE. This is the oldest photo I have of them.

That was near Yosemite in 1975.

 

[John A.]

Love the pictures and stories.

In looking at the top photo above, the resemblance is uncanny.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Everyone says I look like my dad but they haven't seen that photo.

It's kind of weird . . . Everybody that married into the family on my mom's side were men and they all had the dimple! All the men on Dad's side also had the dimple.

I grew a beard to cover it up because I thought it made me look too cute, but my beard is a scraggly thing that didn't last but a few years.

Anyhow it was inevitable that I would have the dimple.

 

[CaddmannQ]

This is the big house on the hill that was built by my great grandpa on Mom's side. We lived there for a while when I was a toddler. This is how it looks today but it hasn't changed much since 1965.

When I was child, that house was alone at the very edge of the woods/town. Dogs would come out of the woods to eat their chickens and geese. Great-grandma kept her shotgun in the umbrella stand by the back door.

In the 60s, grandma and great-grandma on Mom's side moved to this tiny house after their men had passed away. There was no Ivy (?) on it in '65.

The house with the Dish had a huge tree in the back and we played with those neighbor kids. We climbed that tree until a kid living there broke his arm & we were verbotten. Then we found the Jarts, but that only lasted one afternoon before confiscation. We nearly speared Grandma's dog.

Then we discovered a big coal cellar and an old brassie and a nibllick in the basement. We looked pretty bad after chipping and driving coal lumps at a concrete wall for hours, and great-grandma made some very un-pc remarks after she saw the mess I left in her sink.
Great-grandma's dog was named Boy. She always had dogs and all her dogs were named Boy. I guess it was easier that way. Dogs weren't so much of a pet in her day as now.

Dad went TDY to Vietnam pre-training in winter '64 & was running the radar in Dong-Ha by Jan '65. After fleeing New York for Kentucky, we lived upstairs, in the middle house in this pic for 3 mos. The neighborhood has gone downhill a little bit but the truth is it hasn't changed that much since 1965.


This is Grandma and Grandpa's house on Dad's side, as it looks today. The front porch and side porch were added on some time about 1960. Someone covered the shingles with modern siding.


It used to have a steep hill with a creek in back, but in '65 they were filling it all in & probably piped the creek away. It's all flat out back where landfill extended the neighborhood by 2 dozen houses.