Of all the pictures that I have come across in researching my mother's family this one comes close to being my favorite. On the left is my Uncle Hughie, in the center is my Aunt Marie, and on the left is my Uncle Bert. They were children of Byrd and Jessie Davis Ryland.
There were seven children born to my grandparents: Nevalyn, called Bob; Florence; Virginia, my mother; Marie; Byrd Jr., called Bert; Hugh; and Marjorie. The Ryland family lived on a farm in Caldwell, Kansas, right on the Oklahoma border south of Wichita. All the children except for Virginia and Margie were born in Kansas; my grandfather Byrd often moved the family to Colorado Springs for his health, and it was there that the other two were born.
The youngest child, Margie, was born in 1925. In 1929 my grandma divorced my grandpa. In lieu of child support, she took a settlement which included some acreage with a house on it in Mulvane, Kansas. By 1929 the oldest son Bob had gone to California to try his luck at the movies. Florence, the oldest daughter, had a job in Wichita and was engaged to be married. My mother, who had graduated from high school in 1928, stayed in Colorado Springs because she was working for a photography studio and was scheduled to be sent to Illinois to a school for retouching. So grandma packed up the four remaining children and moved to the house in Mulvane.
This picture is obviously from the time they lived on the farm. In spite of it being taken in the beginning of the depression, at that point in time the family was not poor. Those clothes were what children in farming communities wore then. As adults, my aunts and uncles talked about that time on the farm with only good memories of it being a part of their childhood.
I heard three stories from my mom about the time on the farm. One was that it was so hot in the summer that my grandma hung wet sheets up in the doorways to try to catch a cooling breeze. One was that my grandma had chickens and she loved them all. The third was that when the house burned down, my mother's high school yearbook was burned up with it.
It was this fire that turned my grandma's eyes toward California, and when she got an insurance settlement from the fire, she packed up the kids, including my mother, and headed to California. Her son Bob encouraged her to come out, saying he was sure she could find work here. When they arrived the depression had deepened and there was no work. It was a hard struggle for them, as it was for most of America.
My mother always regretted having lost her yearbook in the fire at the farm. I didn't know about the hobby of genealogy until after mother died, and my delving into it was really motivated by her no longer being around to answer my questions about family things. In my first trip back to Colorado Springs I went to the Penrose Library there and inquired if they had a collection of high school yearbooks from 1928. They did, and I found the one with my mother's high school graduation picture in it. I made a photocopy of the picture for my files.
But a few months later, I wrote a letter to the newspaper and asked if they had a place in their newspaper appropriate to post a query for me: to see if anyone had a 1928 yearbook that I could purchase from them. I told them the story of how my mother's yearbook had burned up in a fire and how much I would like to have one. Within three weeks I had two copies in my hand; one from a retired caretaker who couldn't bear to see the old annuals thrown away so he stored them in his house all those years. The second was from a long-lost friend of my mother who said she never looked at hers anymore and since she had no children, she'd like to pass it on to me.
Having two of them enabled me to give one to my sister. Mom's picture is in there - and the inscription next to it says, "For she is sweeter than perfume itself." And my mom was.
Genealogy is about going back into our ancestry as far as we can. But it is also adding dimension to the family members we know and love. All of my aunts and uncles are gone now. I was lucky that they lived long enough for me to enjoy them adult-to-adult. The pictures I've found of them as children is a real bonus.
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