She's Ada. Maybe Alice. Ada Alice.

[fflo]

I'm sending her off in the mail tomorrow. I found her among old postcards some time back. I love her.

The faint ink at the bottom seems to give a name, but we'll never know.






 
 

Comments

[crankyasanoldma.livejournal.com]

It just kills me to think of this photo as unknown, the image unloved. Even worse to think someone somewhere is doing research and wonders what her great-grandmother Ada looked like--and will never know.

Someone contacted me with an old photo they'd found, thinking it might be one of the Schneidewendts on my husband's mom side. I don't think it was. At least that photo had a name you could read. The person despaired of ever finding who should get it, though.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I have quite a few family photos of people I can't identify, other than that they must have had some relationship to my dead relatives. Since my brother and his family aren't interested in these, and I have no one to leave them to, any that don't end up in the trash will end up in junk shops and maybe in the hands of someone like me, taken by one or two, for whatever reasons. Worried, far-away Ada at least has us looking at her.

And I do love her. Is that crazy? I love her face, and her funny buttons and fancy dress fabric, and how it seems from her face (though yeah possibly as a side effect of sitting still for a photo & not smiling, as folks did) that she has aching confusion or sad disconnection or acute smallness or other facially evidenced inner human realities. And here some person is, years after she's gone, briefly postulating about that stuff in her.

It's a tiny thing, but it's in the tininess of the connection (I have to her) that a poignancy of human experience resonates big. It underscores the fleeting ephemeral poof. And thus the treasure of what we have for grounding and connection while we have it.

But listen to me, going on, with my headache, here another afternoon at the office. :0}

[crankyasanoldma.livejournal.com]

Do any of them have names on them like this one? Have you done much genealogy?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

The ones I'm thinking of don't have names on them, and I'm sometimes not clear on which side of the family they came from --- if either! Haven't done much genealogy, no. I found a cousin of my mother's online a few years ago, but I doubt anybody is enthusiastically interested in the pix, or helping me identify them. Could be wrong, I guess.

It just feels like one of those household dealing-with-shit projects I'll likely never get to. Big shit backlog, y'see. Slow shit pace. :)