Florence & Her Family

Let this impressive team of oxen introduce the old family photo album I bought in an antique shop, as a gift to myself on the day after Christmas. It was among many cards and ephemera in a set of shelves and boxes. I thought that the album was somehow connected to the papers of a local Catholic priest who died a few years ago and who is easily traced, but on closer inspection, that was a dead end. More possible as a connection are three pictures of "Grandma + Grandpa Tomlinson" and their gathered clan in Connecticut, which were next to the album, loose in a stack. I and my sister are leaning toward there being no connection there either, but it's tantalizing because for those shots we have a surname.

Only one photo glued into the album itself is inscribed. It reads, "Florence, Sept. 1914." It shows a girl of 9 or 10 years old. She and her younger sister appear in dozens of the pictures.

This photo was posed in the roadway in front of the family home. It seems to be paved, and there is a utility pole on the left at a distance. The man is probably one of the 15 employees who stand in an unposed-seeming shot, elsewhere in the album. farther along the road are other buildings.

What I can now say about Florence and her family is that they lived somewhere near New York City on a small farm that grew crops and kept cattle, horses, chickens, dogs, and cats.

Florence's was a family of cat lovers. In my coming blips I'll share images of children and adults holding their cats, kittens in cans; cats looking sweet.