Altered Mother’s Day photo album: Emily (Creager) Conover

This page of the altered photo album I made for Mother’s Day 2007 features my great-great-grandmother Emily (Creager) Conover. She was married to William Henry Conover, son of James Conover, Civil War prisoner and possible victim of the Sultana explosion.
I thought of Emily Conover over the Memorial Day weekend. I think of her every Memorial [...]

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Altered Photo Album: Lillian (Illie) Applegate

This page of the altered photo album I made for Mother’s Day 2006 is devoted to my great-grandmother, Lillian Illie (or Illi) Applegate. She married my great-grandfather, John Black Applegate, son of Emily Jane Reddick Applegate.
Great-Grandma (or Grandma-Up-Dayton, as she was known long after she’d moved from the Dayton area), was also my godmother. I [...]

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Altered photo album: Emily Jane (Reddick) Applegate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Here’s another page in the altered photo album I made for Mother’s Day last year:
This page features Emily Jane (Reddick) Applegate. She’s my maternal great-great-grandmother, mother of John Black Applegate, my grandfather’s father. Her mother was a Creager; she married Joseph Martin Applegate.
I didn’t have a good photo of her when she was younger. All [...]

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Altered Mother’s Day Album: Minerva Alice (Hutchinson) Mount

This page of the altered photo album I made for Mother’s Day last year is dedicated to Minerva Alice (Hutchinson) Mount. She’s my great-great-grandmother. Her son, George Dale Mount, married Helen Conover, and their daughter was my Grandma Martha (Mom’s mother).
I never knew much about Alice Mount (as she was known about the time the [...]

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Mother’s Day altered photo album

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Last year I wanted to make my mother a special gift for Mother’s Day. I had an old, dilapidated photo album with a broken lock that I’d gotten on eBay (I’d bought it for the photos, thinking maybe there would be long lost relatives in it because of it being from Brown County, Ohio — [...]

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Cabin Crafts and Needlework #3: Canada goose

Back in the 1990s, my mother and I had a small booth at one of the local craft malls that was part of the Coomer’s chain. Mom mostly did her own style of decorative painting (original black line drawings filled in with acrylic washes); I did a weird mix of needlecraft, whatever crafts I was [...]

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Cabin Crafts and Needlework: First of a Series

I was looking around my mother’s house, getting reacquainted with items that had surfaced after the holiday decorations came down. I realized how many items I’d made with a cabin or lodge look that were on display in the guest bedroom where I sleep when I visit on weekends.
Some of these things were made especially [...]

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November 22, 1963

 Every Baby Boomer has their story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.
I’m a Boomer as well, so of course I must share my story:
November 22 fell on the Friday before Thanksgiving that year. In grade school we had to sell [...]

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Halloween in the 1950s — East End, Part 2

My mother and I were talking over the weekend about what was my first Halloween costume.  She said she thought it was the tiger suit she made for me (see photo above, circa 1958). I said I wondered if it was the Mickey Mouse costume my brother’s wearing in this same photo. I don’t remember actually dressing [...]

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Halloween in the 1950s–East End, Part 1

 
I was born in 1954, so my earliest Halloween memories come from that decade. We lived upstairs of Grandma and Grandpa in a small two-family house in the East End section of Cincinnati. The outside stairs that led to the door of our flat were too rickety to be climbed, so beggars (as they were often called [...]

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