Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Genealogy Spring Cleaning - Tuesday

The Family Curator has come up with a week's worth of Genealogy Spring Cleaning Activities. For Tuesday, The Curator says:
Shake the rugs for dust and lost things.
We once found a long-lost wedding band hidden in the depths of a flokati rug. Family documents, photos, and treasures have a way of drifting around a house when they are pulled out to show a relative or to be examined more closely. Gather together any items that have misplaced and return to their archival home. Add any others discovered in the search. Photograph or scan any newly found items to share.
Today I found 2 old photos that were never returned to their homes.  The first is a photo of my great grandfather John Eugene Roos in The Cheney Bakery, which he owned in Cheney, Washington. My second cousin once removed (don't you just love the cousin titles?) examined the wall calendar to date the picture around May 1919.  I had pulled the picture out to scan and send to the Cheney Historical Museum and apparently forgot to put it away.  This is one of my favorite pictures because there is a lot going on even though there is only one person in the picture.  Check out the food in the display cases (yum) and on the wall, the old stove, the wall calendar, wall paper and of course great grandpa.



The other photo I had pulled out of my unidentified photos box because the same cousin wrote me to saying she had identified one of the individuals in the picture.  So now I need to make some notes and put that photo in its new home.

A very successful activity for today!

© 2010, copyright Michelle Goodrum

6 comments:

  1. Oh wow---LOVE that picture. My 2nd great-grandpa also owned/worked in various bakeries, and although he'd retired by the time this photo was taken, this gives me a sense of what they might have looked like.

    Workplace photos of ancestors are my favorites. Work was such a big part of their lives, but we hardly ever find photos of them there.

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  2. I love store photographs. I could stare at them all day. Thanks for sharing yours!

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  3. I did a double take when I saw Cheney! :-)

    -Miriam in Spokane, WA

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  4. This looks like classic Photo Detective picture. So much to look at! What a treasure.

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  5. I love the picture. My grandpa had a bakery store in their home. When they purchased it in 1960 it was owned by a dressmaker that had a nice size store front. He turned it into a bakery and moved the family into the rest of the house. He has since closed the bakery in 1992 (if I remember correctly). My cousin moved into it turned it into an apartment but he still has the large counter in it. He made it his "bar." Don't you love young men and how they decorate their apartments.

    My grandparents still heat the rest of the home with stoves like that. They have coal burning ones. They have a big oven/stove in the kitchen they still use to cook on now. It gets really hot in there during the summer. I can't imagine how much Coal they must go through every winter to heat the old house.

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  6. Thanks for all the great comments! Miriam, I am dying to get back to Cheney. I haven't been there in many years and have tons of great memories!

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