Portrait of a Family

When you spend your days learning things about your ancestors - three, four, ten, even fifteen generations ago - you come to think you know them just a little. In most cases, you can only imagine what they looked like as you obviously never met anyone past a great grandparent - if you even met them.  So anytime you can find a picture of an ancestor, it is like finding treasure. 

Yesterday I was working on the Shaw side of my family tree - my paternal grandmother's side - when I found a link to a picture I had never seen before.  Someone from Ohio put it up on ancestry.com.  I don't know if he's a relative, or just someone who searches through records and puts things up.  I've also come across the name of this man in connection with my maternal side of the family and I doubt he's related to both sides, although it is possible, I suppose. 

Anyway, the picture is a group photo and it was taken in about 1903. It's not in great shape.  There are two obvious places in the photograph where someone cut it as if to remove certain people from the others.  Don't know if it was deliberate, or some 5 year old child got ahold of the picture and practiced their scissors work on it.  It actually looks deliberate to me, and that makes me curious.  Was there a falling out between members of this family?

The man on the top left is my paternal great grandfather, and below him, holding a little girl, is my paternal great grandmother.  My own grandmother had not yet been born when this picture was taken.  The two people in the middle of the picture are my great great grandparents.  The man with the beard was Jacob Burden, the woman to his left Rebecca Lippincott Burden.  They had 5 children.  But Jacob had been married previously and had 4 children with his first wife.  Both sets of children are in this picture, along with spouses and grandchildren.

This picture is remarkable to me for many reasons - the fact that so many family members are gathered for one photograph.  The fact that it's not in a studio, but outside.  The fact that someone with a quality camera took it.  The fact that so many family members are living.  The fact that it even survived.  But even more remarkable to me is how attractive this family is - how much (aside from the clothing), many of them could fit in today in our society.  The children look much like other children I see running around today and the adults are all so handsome and healthy looking.  I've seen many pictures from this time period and the people in them look like they belong in the early 1900s.  These people don't.  They seem more vibrant and alive to me.  Perhaps it's the way some of the woman are holding their babies, or the the way some of them have their hands on others' shoulders, or the way the little boy, fourth from left, has his arms crossed and a scowl on his face as if he finds this whole enterprise boring and he just wants to run off and have some fun.  Some of them look as if they could simply jump off the page. 

This picture, as so many pictures, is a reminder that people who are no longer here were once alive and happy, working and playing, loving their children and sometimes grieving over the loss of someone.  They were as alive as we are now - and that is one of many reasons I love photographs that bring them back to life, if only on paper.