Roots 11

I'd posted this 1916 photo of my beloved Aunt Thyra in her confirmation dress some time ago on my Dorien Grey and Me blog, but it is such a lovely photo, and since we're now focusing on important people in my life, I couldn't resist. I hope you don't mind.

Roots 10

And then, sometime around 1929, Franklyn Guerdon Margason met Odrae Lucille Fearn, leading inevitably, four years later, to the birth of Franklyn Roger Margason, who would be the last of one branch of the Margason tree. (There are Margasons out there, just none who are related to me.) And time, as they say, marches on.

Roots 9

I ran this photo of my dad, circa 1925, some time ago on my "Dorien Grey and Me" blog, but since I have so few photos of dad's early years, felt it appropriate to run it again. His expression is guarded, as though he were not quite sure what to expect next. I seem to have inherited that trait from him.

Roots 8

Franklin Guerdon (named for the captain of the ship on which my great-grandmother Adams came over from Ireland) Margason was born October 11, 1912, and was therefore about six years old when this photo was taken posing proudly with his mother, holding a stick rifle. But while he loved playing soldier as a boy, when WWII came along, he was married and had a child and workig in a defense plant,which deferred him from the draft. Therefore, like an entire generation of young boys playing solier, he never had to become one.

Roots 7

Mother was born into a far different world (here probably around 1916)than she left. It was a comfortable world of comfortable homes and ornate furniture, where little girls---before such conveniences as washing machines---wore crisp white dresses with bows in their hair. But it was also a world in which disease swept unchecked across the world, as the influena pandemic would prove two years later when it claimed my grandmother Fearn, mother's mom.

Roots 6

A three year old Odrae Lucille Fearn looks calmly into the lens of time. The year is 1912, and people are still talking of the recent sinking of the Titanic. Fifty-eight more years of life lie ahead of her: a long time looking forward, not the flicker of an angel's eyelash looking back.

Roots 5

In the 42 years they had with one another, Uncle Buck (Charles, born 1900) and Odrae (born 1911 and named Odrae because her Norwegian-born mother assumed that was the way to spell "Audrey")were textbook syblings. Uncle Buck's job was to protect his little sister, and mother worshipped her big brother. Both were heavy smokers and both subsequently died (Uncle Buck in 1953, Mother in 1971) of cancer. Their families take great comfort in the assurances of the tobacco industry that there is no link between smoking and cancer. Well, their saying so is certainly all the proof I need.