You know when you feel like you’re on a roll with themes? Yep! Two weeks in a row and I feel like I’ve got a perfect photo for the theme. Even better, this is an update to an older post.
While these two folks don’t appear to be related to me, they played a part in my great grandmother’s life and kept in contact for a number of years. I know I’ve mentioned before about how blood relatives weren’t the only people in the lives of our ancestors and it’s easy to forget that neighbors and friends played a role in their lives as well. This is another example of that. My great grandmother, Olga (Kitko) Powis, apparently referred to the daughter of Mr & Mrs William Howell as “Aunt” Nellie Eimer, but I don’t think they were actually related. The term appears to have been symbolic. Nellie was the daughter of William H Howell and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smith who were married in 1863 in England and celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on 17 September 1913, just a year and a few months before Lizzie died on 1 December 1914. Both came to the USA from Shropshire, England, bringing their two daughters, Nellie and Sarah, with them. I found an article about their celebration in the newspaper, and you can even see in the photo above that the roses mentioned in the article appear on William’s jacket and Lizzie’s lap. Pretty neat to be able to connect the article to the photo to have a very exact date for the photo! From other photos, I know William made several visits to my great grandmother and her mother over the years – he shows up in a few photos with them before he passed away in 1920. The trip is about 3.5 hours by car today, so I have to imagine they had some sort of special relationship to make that kind of journey a number of times though I’m not sure how or where they crossed paths. William and Lizzie arrived sometime around 1882 or so, and Olga’s mother Jessie didn’t arrive until about 1890. Jessie was only two years older than Nellie, but they lived in very different areas in England. I’d love to figure it out one day, but it doesn’t appear that the Howells have any living descendants. Nellie never had children, and while her sister Sarah had two children (Wilfred McCoy and Lucy Elizabeth McCoy Knickerbocker) it appears that Lucy’s child Frank Knickerbocker never had any children, and neither did Wilfred. It’s sort of weird to think that folks who made such an impression on the lives of my ancestors have no living descendants of their own.
They both have lovely sweet faces.
I also like to look into family friends and especially witnesses to marriages. Sometimes it leads nowhere but it can turn up the unexpected at times. They must have been close friends. I love the surname Knickerbocker and I’m guessing it would be easy to research.
William and Lizzie look lika a lovely, kind old couple and as you say, sad that unlike my gg grandparents celebrating their 50th anniversary, they had no descendants. It sounds like William was still working at 75!