In My Grandmother's Hands, 1924

I've noticed in the "About" write-ups of more than a few Blippers that we began with Kodak Brownie box cameras. Introduced in 1900, they enabled ordinary people to take photos, instead of having to depend solely on formal studio photos to document their lives.

I don't know who took this photo of my maternal grandmother, Evelyn St. Clair Werth, in 1924, but I treasure it because it's the only one I've ever seen of her with a camera. Along with some other old family photos, I recently had it restored as much as possible, and hope it reaches its 100th birthday intact.

Called "Memie" by her 14 grandchildren (I was the 7th), she was a gentle, soft-spoken woman. She was the only grandparent my sisters and I had, and we enjoyed our visits to her house almost every summer. Memie kept her photos in a shoebox and sometimes would take a few out and tell us about the people in them. I've wished many times in my later years that I had written down some of those stories; so much is lost when family history is not documented.

You can see her here seven years earlier with her first two children, my uncles Bill and John; my mother, her only daughter, was born two years later, in 1919, and a third son, my Uncle Bud (Fred), in 1921. In Memie's handwritten family record book , which came to me a few years ago, I read of a fifth child, "Little Brother," who "came and went on Sept. 20, 1926, at Gran's and Old Dad's" (her in-laws) as she wrote. That was the first time I had heard of this baby; perhaps she went into labor there and he was born prematurely, with none of the special care available today.

I wonder what will become of the hundreds of photos we take -- will our descendants be interested in them 87 years after they were taken, and will they marvel at the simplicity of the cameras we used, just as I marvel at the one my grandmother holds here?