Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Great-grandfather


I have three images of my great-grandfather, Samuel Harvey Morell.  Mr. Morell was born in 1847. The picture on the left is from a family portrait taken in the first decade of the 20th century.  The photographer in those days hauled his equipment to the home.  Ma and Pa each brought a kitchen chair into the yard, the photographer clustered the kids around them in a supposedly artistic arrangement, and shot the picture.  Grandfather would have been about sixty in this pose.

The center picture is another photographer-visits-the-home work taken some time later, so we will guess Samuel to be somewhere in his seventies.  The picture on the right is known to have been taken in 1937.  It is a snapshot.  It was taken on his 90th birthday in January.  He died in April, having spent his entire life in Scott County, Virginia.

I met my great-grandfather when I was less than a year old.  Of course I do not remember that.  I wrote a bit about his family here.

7 comments:

Shelly said...

Those are amazing pictures, and fascinating it is to see the passage of time in the three.

Vee said...

The need to sport a beard must be genetic. Smile!

Unfortunately, our grandfather did not live nearly as long as did his father.

vanilla said...

Shelly, I thought the fellow aged quite well, no?

Vee, I always felt that Grandpa died too young, and sixty-nine was young for his line.

Secondary Roads said...

Love that beard. He was a handsome fellow.

Like you, I met my great grandfather when I was too young to remember.

Grace said...

I think I like the last photo best...I love old photos - one of the great disappointments of my life was that I did not retrieve boxes of photos from my mother - when she moved she threw them out - some were taken in Italy before the families emigrated. What a waste!

vanilla said...

Chuck, it does seem that the old gentleman cherished and cared for that hirsute adornment.

Grace, the snapshot which I cropped to obtain this pose of GGrandpa shows the old gentleman with his youngest son who would have been about forty at the time.

Sorry about the loss of that family treasure. I like the old pictures, too.

Sharkbytes said...

Great-grandfather born before the Civil War! Well, actually, mine was born right after. All men of "great" distinction of any degree were dead before I was born.