The Bucklin Sisters in 1937

It’s getting more and more difficult to find great old family photos that I haven’t used before!  I’ve written over 400 posts in the last eight years of writing these posts.  Can it really be eight years?  Actually it will be eight years in the middle of this month.  Back in 2015 I fixed up a photo of my mom’s mom and shared it with everyone on my Facebook page.  I call them my Throwback Thursdays on there.  I came up with that name myself!  I suppose I should really say that I copied the trend that was started by someone else.  The posts became more wordy and once I started, I just haven’t been able to stop.

I’ve found lots more photos through the years and found more stories, but the best photos are the ones I’m more likely to share.  I guess I’ll just have to look a little harder so I can keep it going longer.  I found this photo as I was scouring through photos of my mom’s family.  It’s a photo that I scanned at a very high resolution.  I don’t know why, because it’s a very blurry photo.  I just have lots more pixels of blurriness!  So I reduced the number of pixels, cleaned it up a bit, and enhanced it.  Alma’s left eye was whited out, so I had to clone her other eye and manipulated it a bit.  It looks pretty good to the casual observer.

The title is a little misleading, because not all of these little girls are Bucklin sisters.  One of these is not like the others.  My mom was Betty Lou Bucklin and she was born on May 20, 1933, in Hathaway, Louisiana.  Her parents were Fred D. Bucklin and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  Little Betty Lou is the second one from the left in this photo.  She had almost white hair when she was younger.  She always referred to it as towheaded.  Her father had whitish blond hair like that as a child also.  As you can see, little sister Alma also had that trait.  Alma was born in 1935.  If you haven’t figured it out yet, Alma is the one on the far left.  Older sister Sylvia had darker hair.  She is the one on the far right and she was born in 1931.

The youngest Bucklin sister in this photo is the little baby in the front of the others.  I’m pretty sure that is my Aunt Loris.  She was born in 1937 and that date is what I used to determine when this photo was taken.  Loris has darker hair like her older sister had.  And that leaves us with one more little girl in the photo.  Or maybe it’s a boy.  It can be difficult to tell with children at that age.  I don’t recognize the person.  I wasn’t around back then!  But I’m thinking that the child was likely a cousin of my mom.  So hopefully some of my cousins can help me to identify the mystery child.

I like this photo.  It’s kind of odd because of the different looks on all of their faces.  Only Aunt Sylvia is smiling, but the rest of them look like they’re trying to figure out what is going on.  Surely they knew what a camera was.  I don’t think my mom was still mad about getting a “little boy haircut” the year before.  But that’s okay.  I’ve always liked candid photos, and this one has a candid look.