A Phenice Frankenphoto

Sylvan, Myrtle and Grace Phenice circa 1907.

This is an unusual looking photo, isn’t it? It’s been pieced together a bit like that famous monster. That wasn’t the plan when I first decided to post this photo, but it came about from the story I wanted to tell. I also want to refer back to a couple of previous posts. I had once said that I didn’t have a photo of my grandmother when she was a youngster. I even suggested that she might have not liked the way she looked when she was younger and got rid of the photos. (I was thinking that I mentioned that in the Pool Post, but actually it came from the Graduate Post.) I also mentioned that I had discovered some old photos back in November. (That one was from a comment to the Camelot Post.)

So this is one of the photos that I discovered in a box of old negatives that I have had since the 1980s. At least the main portion of the photo is from that photo. Around 1982 Grandma (my maternal grandmother Myrtle Phenice Bucklin) asked me to take some photos of some of her old photos. So I borrowed some of her old photos and took some black and white photos of them with my old Canon SLR camera. She paid for the film, of course. I was a poor college student at the time after all. When I got the prints in, I gave her a set of prints, some of the negatives, and returned her old original photos. My set of prints and negatives went in a box. They were just old pictures. I didn’t want them in my photo albums.

Fast forward to November 2016. I went looking for some other negatives that I wanted and came across these old black and white photos that I had completely forgotten about. They made a liar out of me. I said that there were no early photos of her. And I had one all along. Fortunately the names were written on the back of the photo. The boy in the photo is Sylvan Austin Phenice who was born Nov. 23, 1901. He was the first child born to Harry Clifton Phenice and Daisy Keys Phenice. In the middle of the photo is my grandmother. She was born Myrtle Daisy Phenice on Dec. 19, 1906. The other girl in the photo is Grace Leona Phenice, who was born Dec. 14, 1903. They were all born in Louisiana. The family lived in Colorado for a short time after the birth of Grace and before the birth of Myrtle. (See Gold Mine Post)

But in finding the “lost” photo, I realized something else. I had a piece of the original photo in a group of photos that I had gotten from my mom. I didn’t know who was in the photo or what the rest of the photo was, but I knew that part of the photo was missing. The original piece that I had is what makes up the head of Sylvan in the upper left portion of the photo. So now I know that the missing part of the original photo is my grandmother as a toddler. Where, oh where, is the rest of the photo? Don’t I wish I knew! As you can see, the detail in the original is much better than the photo I took in 1982. And I thought I was being so clever!

Well, at least I found this old photo of my grandmother. And I identified part of the original photo. And remembered something else. Remember when I said that I wondered if my grandmother got rid of her old photos because she didn’t like the way she looked in them? That was so far from reality! My mom has a baby photo of herself that was from a contest she won. Something like “Gerber’s Cutest Baby” or some such thing. Well I can remember my mom saying that Grandma used to say, “Well I was a cute baby, too.” and probably showed my mom this old photo to prove it. And from what I could tell, it seemed like there was a bit of contention about who had been the cutest baby. Some people’s children!