Today’s post is about unlabeled photographs. Please label your photos so people in the future will know who the heck is in the photo.
I think these are from the Wilcox side of family, but they could be on the Melrose. I have no clue. And I’ve held onto these photos most of my adult life. I should have asked my parents while they were still alive. That would have been too simple. I know they are family, but how I know that is now lost to me through the haze of decades.
I probably snagged them when the Wilcox family heirs were busy tossing all the old family photo albums and my sister, my cousin, and I sat and saved photos, mostly of ourselves but also of some ancestors. My cousin, Reisa, my age, kept all the embarrassing photos of me and I, likewise, kept all the embarrassing ones of her. My sister got whatever we two didn’t want being younger than the pair of us older bullies.
The family was a disaster: my father and his sister’s daughter, Dad’s half-brother, and two step siblings all vying over the paltry belongings of Gramps and Granny. It was chaos and sometimes it was downright ugly. Dad’s sister died young and her sole heir was her daughter. One step sibling never made it to the chaos, but the other two brought their spouses. They even argued over the sheets. THE SHEETS.
But they threw away the old photo albums.
Luckily, we three teenage girls were on the scene to filter through the albums and rescue some of the history. And, for the most part, the photos I walked away with were labeled with names and dates.
Then, there are these two. If they are Wilcox family at all, and not on the Melrose side of things.
A battered sepia-tone of girls, apparently twins(?).
And this beauty in a stylish hat.
The embossed seal in the lower right corner is all I have to go on.
The Wilcox side of my story spent a lot of time in Chicago. The Melrose side stayed in Wisconsin, for the most part.
For now, I will set these two aside and hope that I will find clues or an outright answer later on in my research of my ancestry.
Heck, I might even discover the Hiram Walker land deed is from the Wilcox side of things as well.
Jaci Dawn 