A Family Portrait

My father's side of the family. The adults, from the left, are Lizzie (Curran) Arnold, Fannie (Arnold) Smith, Herbert Elmer Arnold, Emily (Sessions) Arnold, Harry Lee Smith, Sidney Brown Smith. In the front is my aunt, Jane Elizabeth Smith.

When I was much younger, probably in my twenties, my father gave me a copy of this old family photograph. In the picture are my Dad's older sister (age two here), Dad's parents, and his four grandparents. My Dad isn't in the picture, but he was there in utero; his mother was about six months pregnant at the time of the picture.

I don't remember when I first saw this picture. I was at least a teenager and maybe out of college. I do remember being immediately captivated by it. Other than my Aunt Jane (the child) I never met any of the people in this picture. I hadn't even seen pictures of most of them.  So this single picture was an "Aha" moment for me—discovering what Dad's entire family looked like.  And for some reason the deliberate organization of the entire family in one neat picture made it all the more interesting.

At the time, I didn't know much about most of these people, just a few tid-bits that came up in my Dad's recollections of his youth.  His mother (second from left) studied voice at Oberlin Conservatory. Her father (3rd from left) owned and operated a laundry company in the town of Oberlin. Dad's father (2nd from right) was a farmer, who died when Dad was a boy, and Dad's grandfather Smith (on the right) lived to be over one hundred years old.  Since then, I've managed to learn more about my family, partly by asking Dad about them, but also by digging through old newspapers and other records.

Returning to the picture, from left to right, the adults in the picture (and their relation to me) are:

• Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Curran) Smith (1860 – 1945): Great-grandmother
• Fannie Diem (Arnold) Smith (1893 – 1976): Grandmother
• Herbert Elmer Arnold (1863 – 1933): Great-grandfather
• Emily Jane (Sessions) Arnold (1866 – 1941): Great-grandmother
• Harry Lee Smith (1890 – 1941): Grandfather
• Sidney Brown Smith (1861 – 1962): Great-grandfather

The girl is Jane Elizabeth (Smith) Rumbold (1929 – 2011), my aunt. 

The picture was taken outside Sidney Smith's house at 9 Jackson Street in Silver Creek, New York.  He had been a farmer for much of his life.  When he retired, Harry, his son, took over the farm, and Sidney bought this house "in town" in Silver Creek. The Arnolds lived in Oberlin, Ohio, so they must have been visiting.

My dad had guessed that the picture was taken the summer before he was born. There are a bunch of clues about this. There are leaves on the trees and the people look like they're wearing light-weight clothes. In particular, Herbert Arnold's suit looks like a summer print, and Fannie (Arnold) Smith is wearing a sleeveless dress. From this, Dad inferred that the picture was taken sometime between late Spring and early Fall. Dad's sister, my Aunt Jane, was born on November 6, 1929. In the summer before Dad was born (1931), she would have been a few months shy of her second birthday, and that looks like the age of the girl in the picture. Possibly, the picture could have been taken the following summer, in 1932, after Dad was born, but then where is he in this picture? It seems unlikely that in a portrait that clearly includes all the family he would have been left out.

A couple years ago, after I got started in genealogy, I was doing some research about Dad's family in Silver Creek. I was reading some of the area newspapers, searching for references to Dad's father—a somewhat arduous task since "Harry Smith" is a rather common name.  In the Dunkirk Evening Observer from August 1, 1931, I found the following in the news from Hanover Center:

Mrs Harry Smith has been entertaining her father and mother from Oberlin, Ohio.

Hanover Center was the cross-roads village near Harry Smith's farm, a couple miles outside of Silver Creek.  Dunkirk is the nearest large town. In 1930 it's population was over 17,000 (compared to about 3,000 in Silver Creek).

Putting it all together, that must have been the visit when the picture was taken.

One thing I still wonder about the picture is who took it? The one person who isn't in the picture is my great-aunt Hazel Smith (Harry's younger sister). She was a schoolteacher in Buffalo (about 35 miles from Silver Creek). Since it was summer, school would have been out. According to Dad she liked to take pictures and often had a camera with her. So it seems like a reasonable guess that she was the photographer.

If you're like me, it's probably easier to keep track of who's who with a chart or pedigree showing how everyone connects to each other. So here's a snippet of my pedigree showing the people in this photo.

A bit of family background

On this blog I'll be talking a bunch about my ancestors and their descendants. So who are these people?

When asked where my family comes from, I often reply that "I'm a typical American mutt." My ancestors come from a variety of places, arriving in the new world over a span of 270 years. To illustrate, here is an abbreviated pedigree showing the surnames of a few generations of my family.

I have a number of lines that go back to colonial New England (and to Old England before that), including a few Mayflower ancestors on my Cushman and Bundy lines. I also have ancestors who came over from Germany during the Revolution, Irish ancestors who arrived around the time of the Potato Famine, Jewish ancestors from Krakow, which was in Austria when they left, but is now part of Poland, and French ancestors who immigrated in the late 1800s from Quebec. Of course, this is just a small (and entirely European) slice of the broader American experience, but it provides enough variety to keep me hunting for new relatives and for more information about their lives. And there is even more to explore on my wife's side.

In future weeks and months (and years?),  I plan to discuss many of these ancestors.  I'll also talk about a number of their descendants (i.e., my distant aunts, uncles, and cousins).  I enjoy descendancy research. When I discover a sibling or child of an ancestor, my curiosity inevitable leads me down their branch of tree to see what I find. My files include information about dozens of Smith, Elters, Rippe, and Bundy cousins and hundreds of cousins from my Arnold line. Many of those people will make appearances here.

Welcome

Does anyone read the initial post on a blog? In my experience, I discover a new blog and start reading the current posts. I rarely dig through the archives to understand the blog's genesis and early history. Nevertheless, it feels odd to start without a bit of introduction.

So who am I, and what will you find here?

My name is Keith Arnold Smith. As you'll see in future posts, the middle name is a significant connection to my family history. I'm a middle-aged computer systems researcher living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In my day job, I design data storage and data management systems and occasionally write academic papers about them.

When I'm not wrangling bits, I'm stalking ancestors. I've been researching my family history for several years now.  That means that I'm still inexperienced and still have a lot to learn. But I got a bit of a head start from my mother-in-law, Rhoda Elliott Horne. She spent decades researching her own ancestors, as well as those of all of her sons-in-law and any other friend or neighbor who expressed an interest.

Between my job and genealogy, I spend a lot of time in front of computers. But you might also find me in the kitchen baking bread, on the sofa with a crossword puzzle, on the streets of Cambridge taking a walk and listening to an audiobook, or hanging out with my wife and daughter.

Despite my technical background, I don't plan to spend much of time here talking about the use of computers for genealogy. I love my job, but I do enough technical writing at the office. Instead I'm planning to discuss the things I have learned in my research, including:

• Stories from the lives of my relatives. I'll include a number of direct ancestors, but I'll also talk a good bit about cousins off on distant branches.
• Bits of history connected with my family. I initially got started in genealogy because I wanted to know who my ancestors were. I soon discovered that knowing who they were pulls me into the history of the times and places where they lived. I've always enjoyed history, but history with family angle is doubly interesting!
• Stories about the research process. Sometimes how I find information about a relative is more interesting than the relative. For example, someday I will explain how a brief mention of a gold watch in the will of Charles Hitchcock led me to a previously undiscovered branch of cousins.
• Personal perspective and philosophy. I have opinions. Sometimes in reading other blogs, I find myself saying, "That's interesting, I wish I had a place to follow-up with more than a comment." Now I do.

My life is busy, but I hope to post a few times a month. At that rate, I have ideas and material for at least a year or two. If I last that long, we'll see what comes next. I'm always discovering new things about my family. So I'm sure I'll find more topics.

By the way, in case you're wondering: yes, the name Tree and Leaf is taken from J.R.R. Tolkien. No, I'm not related to him.