Academe (where a weathered historian shares)
What does a photo or an object mean? What does a photo or an object mean to you? Two very different questions.
As I continue to work through the photos collected from the farm house, how meaning is attached to context, relationship, and information becomes more and more apparent.
This photo grabbed me. It’s an old photo of a young woman and a very young boy standing to pose for a photo. They are on open land with a porch post visible, indicating a house.
It should come as no surprise that this is part of my family, since I’ve started acting as family archivist. The meaning it holds for me is unknowable unless I share. My uncle identified them as Frances and Alfred. The porch post in the background belongs to the farm house.
To begin, the farm house.
The photos below show “the original homestead” and then the farm house after it was built up with additions to accommodate an anticipated large family — it was large, with ten kids who lived to adulthood.
Questions arise. Whose original homestead was this? Was it part of the homestead movement (I can’t help wondering as I recently wrote about homesteading in Montana)? What’s the cow’s name? Was that my grandparents’ first cow? The farm eventually was a dairy farm. When exactly were the additions made to the house?
The farm house is fresh and full of promise in these photos. There are no buildings behind the house (later there’d be a horse barn, a cow barn, a milk house, a chicken coop, and a machine shed. Maybe the two-holer outhouse is already behind the house. The farm is young, though the Depression meant lean times.
Back to Frances and Alfred. Frances was my grandparents’ firstborn child. She was born in the old country, in Mosty u Jablunkova, in 1908. She died more than thirty years before I was born. Alfred was their penultimate child, born at home (like all the kids who were born in Wisconsin), in 1929. Alfred was my dad. Based on their ages, I have to guess that photo above was taken in 1935.
It was the Depression. My dad is barefoot and looking like he’s happy to be in the photo but he also looks like he’s ready to run off and chase an animal. Frances looks happy to be in the photo, too. I’ve been told I look exactly like Frances. Frances would have two kids of her own a few years after this photo but die in 1942 a few months after having her second. Those two kids would grow up on the farm.
With Critters, It’s Personal
The weekend I collected the photos from the farm, I camped out on the acres down the road, near where the beaver pond was. Now you know why I was so excited to see evidence of beavers in Montana. I walked out to the beaver pond in the morning with my trusted dog, Ande, and it was heaven on earth. Ande thought so, anyway. She ran and ran and ran. Here are photos to prove it.
