Family Photographs

My mother took lots of photos of my sister and I. She had a nice little camera...a bit better than a box camera. She used it for years. I used that same camera to take photos for my high school photography class. Later I took lots of photos of my children too. My sister got our photo album but I took my baby photos out of it first. A few years before my mother died I took her negatives to the drug store and had them printed and made an album so it was right for Barb to have the original album...except for my baby photos. My mother didn't have the negatives for those. I also kept the few photos my mother had from her childhood. Her mother and father also took many photos and kept an album. After the divorce and my grandmother married Sam Dotolo the girls would ask their mother if they could look through the album. One time was too much for Sam. He started yelling at my grandmother and in anger my grandmother threw the album into the fire. The few photos my mother had she got from friends later on.

Mama had many extra photos that didn't go into the album so she separated them and gave them to Barb and I. So with those and the copies I had made I have most of the old photos from my childhood. Now the sad part. My son with the mental problems took my old photos out to a shed on our property and went through them. Some of them were ruined. Some of them were thrown on the ground. I thought they were safe in a closet in the house. It was looking for something else that we found out what had happened. Hailey and my daughter Elizabeth worked very hard to gather them and save them. Now I plan to scan as many as I can to further save them.

This is my great grand father Dexter Clark and his son George Clark. Grandpa Clark was over 40 when he married. He had five children. My great uncle Burt Clark was the oldest. Then there was a girl named Mable then George and then a boy named Lew. Last of all was my grandmother Grace Clark. George was in the Navy during the first word war. He was in an observation balloon that came loose from it moorings and he landed in the sea. A ship rescued him and brought him back to America. George caught the flu on the ship. He had been exposed to TB as a child and he came down sick with that and never recovered. My Uncle Burt had been very close to George. Their mother died of TB when my grandmother was a baby. The youngest children Lew and Grace were put into a children's home. Mable lived with her grandparents and Burt and George stayed with Dexter. Uncle Burt was never sure what happened to his baby brother, he wasn't ever sure what his name was. I found his name and death information on Ancestry.com. Lew died at two years old of pneumonia. My grandmother was taken home by a childless couple who had come to the home to adopt a boy. My grandmother was very sick and the family took her home so she could die in a good christian home.