52 Ancestors (2020) – Week 2: Favorite Photo

This is my third year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.

This is a tough one, as I have many favorite photos. I have shared some of them in the past on this blog but probably didn’t identify them as a favorite photo.

This photo of my two grandmothers doting on the newborn baby (me) is a favorite of mine. This photo shows both grandmothers, Pansy (Lancaster) Johnston on the left, and Anne (Sullivan) Hork on the right. They both look like they are proud grandmothers.

I think the photo was taken at my parent’s house (35 Wharf Dr, West Pittsburg), probably late March 1954, though it is possible that it was taken at Pansy’s home (307 Nancy Lane, Pleasant Hill). The amount of items on the wall point more to my parent’s home and the metal plate looks familiar to me. The coffee table, end table, and lamp were probably made by my grandfather, Tom J. Johnston. He made a lot of furniture in his home wood shop.

My mother liked early American furniture when they first married, and I think it was popular then. You can see the same type of furniture on the hour-long old I Love Lucy shows which aired in the 50s. I recognize also the ashtray and cigarette lighter on the table, but not the ceramic deer. I’m sure by the time I was old enough to walk, those pretty things were put up high or put away.

Pansy was called “Mam-ma”  by her grandchildren and Anne was called “Nana.” Nana, born in 1892, was old enough to be Mam-ma’s mother and I was her fifth grandchild, through her youngest child, Bill. She had been thirty when she married my grandfather, William Cyril Hork in 1922. Mam-ma was just forty years old when I was born and my mother, nineteen. It is too bad that my mother wasn’t also in the photo, as we could have had a three-generation photo. I do have a four-generation photo when my oldest daughter was baptized in 1989.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.