Old pictures of people I never knew

Yet another in the long chain of paradoxes of family for me is that it seems as one gets older and further removed from the closeness with family that we as children so desperately cling to, the more fascinated we tend to get with roots and ancestral connections.  The Love, play and basic need fulfillment that defines family as a child is somehow subjugated as an outgrown modality and we get all academic and picture happy, visiting heritage web sites and using jigsaws to cut symbolic trees out of plywood, plastering the branches with images of the past, when it was extremely un-hip to smile, apparently. 
    I have been learning a bit more about my antecedents lately, especially as my mother prepares to go on a trip to Europe to visit (among other things) the death camps my extended family vanished into.  My grandmother left behind many memories on her walls, and I've requested a particular picture of her and my grandfather, which I always loved.  The collection grows...
    I've also been receiving a series of pictures from the middle history of my father's family in Connecticut.  My uncle Ross has caught the genealogy bug and has spent the last few months dusting off history and slowly scanning it.  I can't say I'd ever put that kind of time and energy into projects like this (I say this now...) but it has been really nice to receive these relatively random pieces of the past, and to be able to download them into the present. 
The Greists have been on the same land for generations, and it has been really nice to finally put faces and images to the names and stories.  This image of Alva Clarkson Greist is haunting in it's resemblance to my dad when he was in college...  My dad, however, was usually smiling, due to in no small part to all the drugs.  He also wore tee-shirts a lot more often than Alva did...

This is the family business, Greist manufacturing.  We made attachments for Singer sewing machines, as well as little sewing gadgets like button holers.  I think if the company had come along just a little later, we could have done well for ourselves by creating a website to promote these products called "www.willitbuttonhole.com"
In this photo, the factory in Waterbury, CT is seen all dressed up for a "Support the troops" welcome home parade following WWI.   USA! USA! League of Nations! Woo-hoo!

This last one is one of my favorite family photos I've ever seen.  I was talking with a friend recently who pointed out that my neighbor's grandfather, Lou Lincoln looks a heck of a lot more like me than my great grandfather... Crazy things can happen when you go out picking raspberries in the shadow of the sleeping giant...

Comments

[eric:p]

Awesome pix.. Good call dude.

[arjuna]

hey, that DOES look a hellovalot like dad! DNA is funny like that.
i got your message, & i'm looking forward to seeing you soon. have a great last few days in CR before vay-k.
oh, i saw john in the "cool new people" section of myspace & guffawed as well. i didn't check out all of the profiles, though, so thanks for enlightening me as to their facinating contents.
pura vida, mi hermano!

[julia]

I wonder who that "friend" was????