A Family in the Scanner

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A Grandmother I never knew. 1910.

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Himself: Swam. No jobs tho more sales jobs have begun appearing. Put up with me. Cooked dinner. Herself: It was as if I had reversed the bug and gone back two days in time. Slept well tho. Reading: To the library where I got six new books. Balance: Not wanting to stop reading at ten at night.

To keep my hands and what was left of my mind busy while I coughed yesterday, I began one of my scanning projects.

Somewhere in the 1960’s, I had taken loose family photos plus pictures from an album I had made for myself and made an album for my mother. When I picked up the album to begin dismembering it yesterday, the cover ripped off in my hands. I had not known about high acid paper when I created this album. Rather than struggle to take the album apart, I began slowly ripping each page out before I carefully took the pictures from the page.

There’s my grandfather at 16 with his father and grandfather. There’s my grandfather’s sister who died at 13 of, I believe, Typhoid. Then there are these delightful images of a grandmother I never knew.


Grandmother Mary age 17.

She met and married my Grandfather in the late 1800’s. The first thing he did was buy her a pair of glasses….something her father wouldn’t allow. After the birth of two children, she settled in to the life of a wife of a workaholic electrical engineer. Despite a heart damaged by a childhood disease, she ran a busy household, delighted in golfing, traveled with her husband and children, and loved being a hostess. She helped put two children through the University of Michigan, but she grew increasingly tired and died in 1928 as a result of an enlarged heart.

She was a lot of fun, they said. Mother always told me that Grandfather regretted his long hours at work after she died.


Grandmother Mary fashionably attired in the second decade of the last century.