So Glad to Meet You!

I wanted to know them.  I wanted to know about their lives, about their families, and I especially wanted to know what they looked like.  I wished I could meet them in person but a photograph would do.  That is, my father's maternal grandparents, Fred and Elvira (Bartley) Gerner.  I'd learned from census research that my grandmother, their daughter, Beulah (Gerner) Doyle, had more than a dozen siblings and that they'd lived in both Butler and Mercer Counties, Pennsylvania.  From a great aunt I learned that Elvira had been a midwife with her own horse and rubber-wheeled buggy.  But I didn't know what they looked like, and they'd lived as recently as the 1920s and the 1940s.  Someone had to have photographs!

In fact, my father had less than a dozen photos of his family:  there were photos of his paternal grandparents, one of his mother who died when he was an infant, and a double photo of his father when he was a youth, but that was it.  I was grateful for what I had but I dearly wanted to know what his grandparents looked like.  To meet them, so to speak.  I envisioned Fredrick as a big man with a thick, dark mustache and Elvira as a strong, petite woman.

Through letters I reached out to distant cousins and hoped that other cousins might find this blog and contact me. 

I corresponded with one of my father's cousins for a few months and then, one day, he sent a package with photographs and I caught my first glimpse of my great-grandparents.  It took my breath away!

I was thrilled!  There were Fred and Elvira and 12 of their 16 children.  So, Fred was not a big fellow with a great mustache and Elvira was not petite.

And then a year or so later another cousin contacted me because of this blog and sent a photograph of the Gerner family taken when the family was younger.

Again, I was thrilled to see photographs of my grandmother, great-grandparents, and some of their children.

I can't decide whether being discovered by cousins who share photos or discovering cousins who share photos is my favorite.  Either way, I'm please to meet cousins and pleased to meet my ancestors through photographs.

This post was written for Amy Johnson Crow's 2020 version of 52 Ancestors.  The post topic was "Favorite Discovery." 

--Nancy.

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