Birthday Girl

Today is my mother-in-law's 85th birthday. We weren't able to make the trek to Texas this year, to celebrate with her, but we did manage to get down there last year for her 84th. The second photo here was taken then. In the first shot she was about five years old, so it dates from around 1929-30. Quite a cutie, wasn't she?

I'm very fortunate in that she and I have always gotten along really well - I know that's not always the case with mothers and their daughters-in-law. She made me feel like a member of the family right from the start, and over the years she's always treated me more like a daughter than an "in-law." Of course, both of us have always thought the guy I married is pretty great - so we had that in common from the beginning.

October is a Busy Month

For some reason, September and October are important months in my family and my husband’s as well. Lots of birthdays, anniversaries and death dates in those two months. So in honor of all the October events, I’m putting up a couple of family photos today.

The first is a very fuzzy copy of an old cabinet card. The lady in the picture is my husband’s (maternal) great-grandmother, Louisa Matilda Kuentz (nicknamed “Lucy”) who was born October 6, 1869, in San Antonio TX. Her mother and father had both been born in Alsace Lorraine, France, and emigrated to this country in about 1850. Not easy to make out her features, but you can tell she must have spent quite a while with a curling iron.

The second photo has also deteriorated over time – I gave it a slight crop, but didn’t do a lot of retouching. It’s a snapshot of my grandparents shortly after they were married on October 8, 1918. My grandfather still has his WWI cavalry uniform on, so it must have been taken very soon after their wedding. He was born in Scranton PA, into a family that had only recently arrived from Wales. He was stationed in San Antonio during the war and met my grandmother there, and just stayed on after the fighting was over. Well, that’s not entirely true – there was a lot of fighting between the two of them after the war, too – but that’s another story.