Just a Lazy Day Circa 1938

Here’s an old photo that could easily be overlooked.  I really don’t remember where it came from.  I’ve scanned old photos and slides, I’ve taken photos of other people’s photos, and I’ve collected digital files from other family members.  For some reason I think it’s an old photo I scanned, but I can’t put my fingers on the original.

It’s funny how some photos are overlooked in a photo album.  Maybe it was small or the people were a bit blurry, but it wasn’t something that stood out to me.  But when I start to look through photos to scan, I start to notice details about photos that are interesting.  And sometimes the scan is much better than the original photo.

Since I can’t find the original right now, I don’t know if the scan looks better.  But there is something sweet about this old photo from around 1938.  On the far left is my mom Betty Lou Bucklin standing at what I think is the back of someone’s house.  I’m thinking it is her Phenice grandparents’ home because that grandmother is in the photo, as well as a Phenice aunt.  Mom would have been 5 years old at the time. Looking toward her is her Phenice aunt Marguerite, who was a single girl of 20.

In front of Marguerite is one of my mom’s younger sisters Alma.  She is a happy little 3-year-old girl in this photo.  The next person is uncertain.  I’m thinking it could be Marguerite’s older sister Grace.  She was 35 at the time, so that might be right.  Maybe someone else knows who she is for sure.  (See update.)  The woman who is sitting on the steps is Marguerite and Grace’s mom, Betty Lou and Alma’s grandmother, and my great grandmother, Daisy Henrietta Martha Keys Phenice.  She would have been the 62-year-old matriarch of this little group.  The 7-year-old girl on the tricycle is my mom’s older sister Sylvia.

It just seems like an idyllic spring or summer day.  Spending time with family doing little or nothing, but enjoying every minute of it.  You can’t go wrong with that.

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11/10/2018 Update: After much discussion among the cousins (and Aunt Loris) on Facebook, it has been determined that the unidentified woman in the photo was my grandmother Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin. That was a nice surprise. It makes the photo that much more special to me. So this photo shows three generations of my family along my maternal line.

I also was able to figure out where I got the image. It was from a group of old photos that I copied for Grandma back around 1979. She let me borrow some of her favorite photos to photograph with my old SLR camera, and this was one of them. I rediscovered the old forgotten negatives a while back. It makes even more sense that it was a photo of her with her mom, sister, and daughters. One that she cherished. And now, so do I.