Me and My Sisters

I had a hard time deciding what to write about this week.  Not really.  I just didn’t have anything that stood out this week for my mom’s side of the family.  Since I wrote something about the Landry family last week, I thought it should be time to write about her side.  I was thinking that the Keys family was due a posting.  There were some interesting things going on with the Keys family this week, but there wasn’t a good photo to go along with it.

I also thought that the interesting thing about the Keys this week wouldn’t be interesting to too many people.  “What was it?” you ask?  Ok, I’ll go ahead and tell you.  I had a couple of new DNA matches at Ancestry this week.  Actually they are matches to aunt Loris.  She’s the only one I tested there until recently.  I sent a DNA sample in recently, but haven’t got my results yet.  I did a DNA test in 2013, but that was at 23andMe.  The interesting thing about the Keys matches is that I think Ancestry has finally passed up 23andMe as far as Keys family members who have tested.  There are about 40 descendants of Henry Keys and Martha Cook who have tested.  And now that I think about it, if I count all of Julie’s family that have tested, 23andMe still has more.

So the interesting thing that happened this week with the Keys family didn’t really happen.  Now I’m glad that this post is not about that!  So the other thing that happened this week is that my brother Rob sent me some old photos that he took back in the 70s.  They were really fun to see, but I didn’t think I would be using any for Throwback Thursday.  Throwback Thursdays are for things that happened a long time ago and the 70s were only 40 years ago.

Then a post that I wrote almost two years ago started getting some attention.  A few people liked it and made a comment about it, and that was that.  But when I was thinking about a theme for this week, I remembered these seemingly unrelated events.  And there was a common theme.  The post that got the attention included a photo of Daddy with his sisters, and one of the photos that Rob sent me was a photo of me and mine.

I had even edited it and got rid of the spots and dust that show up on scans of slides.  So here is a photo of me and my three sisters.  My name is Van and I am the boy in the photo.  I estimated that I am thirteen years old in this photo.  This is based on the fact that I’m not wearing glasses and I got contacts in 1974.

Then there’s my sister with the longest hair in this photo.  That’s my younger sister Jamie and she didn’t have long hair much longer.  She cut her hair really short either in late 1974 or early 1975.  So that would put the time as the summer of 1974.  Jamie and I were in junior high school then.  I was probably still a paper boy, too.

Continuing counterclockwise (and to shorter hair) brings you to Jodie.  She was the oldest of all of the siblings.  She graduated from high school in 1971 and had gone off to college.  She was the oldest, yet she lived the shortest amount of time.  She died in 1989 at the age of 36.

And that brings us to Karen.  She also got contacts in 1974 (as did Al), so I know that it wasn’t just me taking a photo without my glasses so I’d be cuter.  (Something I never did!  Big clunky black glasses in every photo!)  Karen was just starting her senior year in high school (or getting ready to) because she graduated in 1975.

This is my favorite photo of me with my three sisters.  Actually it’s the only one that I can think of.  I probably looked for one when I wrote those posts about sisters two years ago and couldn’t find one.  But now I have one.  Thanks, Rob.  I’m glad you climbed up in our old mimosa tree all those years ago and snapped that picture of us.  It’s a keeper.