Great-grandparents

 

Butler County, Ohio 1918

This photograph of my great-grandparents and their children (my grandfather is standing on left) has always intrigued me. My grandfather's sisters are rather frightening. He regularly gave accounts of his sisters' cruelty toward him (with the exception of Ruth, far right). 

 

His father was born in Canada of Scottish parents, who migrated to Connecticut. My great-grandfather was a farmer like his father before him.

 

His mother was born in New Jersey and in the 1880s moved with her family to southwest Ohio. My great-grandmother was a member of the United Methodist Church and regularly taught and performed music and musicals for her church and the local Grange.

 

I have no accounting of my great-grandparents age or the circumstances around their meeting and marriage. 

My grandfather.

He learned farming as a boy, but initially worked at the Ford manufacturing plant in Hamilton, Ohio. Just before the stock market crash of 1929, he became a policeman in Hamilton and later a motorcycle patrolman. His time as a cop was notorious and mythic (largely as a result of his alcoholism). Around the beginning of WWII, he retired from the force (was asked to leave) following an off-duty motorcycle accident (that nearly took his left leg). He returned to the work of his father, farming and farm management, which he did well around his alcoholism. He would regularly make arrangements to move to another farm job just ahead of going on a binge. Consequently my grandmother and mother lived in many different parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin.