Louis Charles Bucklin Circa 1882

This is a difficult photo.  I have two versions of the original photo, but neither of them is very good.  Both of them are really grainy, faded, and blurry.  That’s the good part.  One of them has holes all over it, like it had been chewed on by a rat at some point.  It also has some tracing on it like someone tried to define some of the edges on it.  Like I said, this is a difficult photo.

But that’s no reason to ignore it over and over again!  I decided it was time to work at making it look a little better.  And, yes, this is the final result as of now.  I think it looks relatively good now.  Maybe one day with software improvements, we’ll get something better.  But in doing so, we will probably lose a lot of the charm of the photo.  There is something charming about these old photos that LOOK like old photos.  The graininess – the faded light – the sepia color – It all adds to the charm.  Then again, some photos that have charm are also really sharp.  I prefer those.

This is a photo of my great grandfather Louis Charles Bucklin.  His son Fred was the father of my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  Louis was born in Masonville, Iowa, on April 11, 1873.  His father was James A. Bucklin, whose family hails from Massachusetts for many generations.  His mother was Mary Ann McGrath, who had immigrated to the United States in the mid 1800s during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland.  I wish I knew the year that they came to America, but I’m sure the family had been in Ireland for generations.

His parents had such distinctly different backgrounds.  That is so different to my dad’s family where cousins married cousins through the years.  His DNA is French, and I can’t even tell which side of his family many of my DNA matches come from.  It’s easy with people who are related to me through Louis Bucklin.  If their family was from Massachusetts, they were connected to the Bucklin lines.  If their family was from Ireland, I connect to them through the McGrath and Mooney lines.

But Louis’s family was no longer stationary.  James and Mary Ann were married in 1854 in Springfield, Massachusetts, but they didn’t stay there.  They moved on to Iowa in 1864 and then to Louisiana in 1884.  They settled in Hathaway, Louisiana, and didn’t move away again.  Maybe they were planning on moving every 20 years, but they just didn’t live long enough!  James died at age 69 in 1890, and Mary Ann died at age 66 in 1900.

Louis was just a little older than he is in the photo when he moved to Louisiana.  His teenage years were spent in Louisiana.  I know he had a childhood sweetheart name May Ausman, but that relationship didn’t last.  When Louis went off to Ohio Normal University in Ohio in 1893, he received a letter from May breaking it off.  It was a traumatic time for him, because his older sister Jennie died shortly after that.  Louis returned home and dedicated himself to the family farm.  When his mother needed some help around the house, she called on a local girl to help out.  That girl was young Addie Hine.  I should say young woman.  She was 18 years old when her family moved down to Louisiana from Indiana in 1894.

Louis must have found Addie attractive.  Or maybe he liked the way she cleaned the house.  The attraction was mutual, and the young couple got married on June 12, 1898, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.   They set up home in Hathaway, Louisiana, and they lived happily ever after.