Twyla Baker, my mother, passed away on Jun 27th, 2019 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was 85 years old.
Mom was born in December 1933, and was the second daughter of Melvin and Gail (Joachim) Patterson. Her parents and her siblings, Dolores, Layton and Lyndon, have already passed on. As her father was a Presbyterian minister and her mother was a church organist and choir director, she grew up in the church, and loved to attend services.
I found out today that Dolores (Joachim) Cantrell, my Aunt Dee, passed away last month, on Feb 17th. Aunt Dee was my mother’s sister, and the oldest daughter of Melvin and Gail (Patterson) Joachim. She has been married to Donald Cantrell since 1954, and they have two children, my cousins, David and Diane.
I remember visiting the Cantrells often as a child; sometimes we would visit them, and other times they would visit us in Michigan.
Sometimes a picture tells a story. Sometimes it does it better than words, other times a picture can help the words along. Sometimes a picture only lets you know that a story exists that you will probably never know. Take this photo of my great-uncle Earl Joachim. Since that is not the traditional dress of 1927, which is about when this photo was taken, there is probably an interesting story here that I will never know.
My great-aunt Betty Joachim passed away on February 1st, in Mexico where she had been living with her son, Bruce. She was married to Starling Joachim for many years until he passed away in 2005. Uncle Star was the brother of my grandfather, Melvin Joachim. Aunt Betty’s maiden name was Ray. I don’t know much about the Ray family, but according to the 1930 U.S. Census in Ohio, her parents were Walter Ray from Georgia and Maude West from Texas, and she was the youngest of four children at the time.
Since one of the purposes of this site is to show the many old family photos I have collected, I’m going to write about one photo every Friday.
This photo is from the collection of my grandmother, Gail (Patterson) Joachim. I see her and my grandfather in the picture. From their apparent age, I’m guessing the photo was taken around 1935 or 1936.
I also see Gail’s parents, Layton and Lillie Patterson.
I ran across this photo in one of the Patterson albums. It is badly faded, and I can’t tell who is in the picture, but it is very clear that the Pattersons took their snowball fights very seriously.
This is one of about a thousand family photos on the site. There is no overall index of photos; you can see them by visiting the page for someone who has photos.
Now that I finally have all the photos from my old website available here, I can get back to researching again! Since I haven’t done any real research in years, I’m finding new tools on the web and new information that wasn’t available previously (or at least was much harder to find…) Ancestry.com is a good source of information, but quite expensive to join! I did join, and it’s yielding some great information, but I was disappointed in the difficulty in pulling information off the site to include in my database.
Those of you with long memories may remember my first family website, which was taken down some years ago. I have finally loaded all the pictures from that website onto this one! This took some time, since I wanted them to be larger and had to regenerate each one from the original scans. Many of them were in bad shape and required quite a bit of work to make presentable.
I have expanded the site to support photos. There are not many available yet, but more will be appearing over time. Also, I’ll be working on improving the layout in the future.
As I scan them into the database, they will appear in the Photos section near the bottom of each person’s page. They are displayed using PhotoSwipe. Hovering over each photo displays the caption, if any. Clicking on any photo displays a gallery of all photos on that page.
The Idris Project is my experiment to present the information I have collected about my ancestors and extended family over the years.
The project is named after my grandfather Idris Charles Baker, pictured to the left, and also after my father, Robert Idris Baker.
I started researching my family several years ago after I found and rescued several boxes of hundreds of family photographs that my mother was storing in her garage and was planning to throw out.