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.
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.
This is the only photo I have found of my great grandparents, William and Annie Baker. As you can see, the quality is poor, but the original is much, much worse; it’s barely recognizable as a photograph. I was able to get it in this condition only with some help from Photoshop. I hope I can eventually find some more pictures of them.
William was born in Bridgwater, Somerset, England in 1862.
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.