Five Generations

     While home on Winter Break, I had the chance to scan a few of Grandma's pictures.  These two were especially fun to view.  This first one is of me at about seven months (guessing) and my great-great grandmother - Pearl Selena Astlin Beall (around age 86 - died the following year).  
     This is what was written about her in Grandma's binder: "She was a good person, easy-going, a hard worker, very compassionate, and she treated everyone well. She was tall and thin, with black hair and blue eyes. She raised her family in the lock house at Lock 25, where there was no electric or running water. The house consisted of a kitchen and living room on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second. There was a cookstove in the kitchen and a woodstove in the living room. She washed the family's clothes in a big tub with scrub board and ironed them with a flat iron, which was warmed on the wood stove, that she used to cook the meals. There was no refrigerator but there was an ice box. The water was fetched in a bucket from the well across the road. Meals that could be stretched to feed nine people were served -- fish, potatoes, beans, biscuits, and cornbread. In the winter, there was always a pot of soup on the cookstove. Life was not easy for the ladies of her time. None of the children were born in a hospital -- they were delivered at home by Aunt Polly (the black mid-wife that lived up the road) and the local doctor."

     This next picture is of five generations of Beall-Poole-Null women.  That's me around 9 months old on Pearl's lap again -- Her daughter, my great-grandmother Edna Mildred Beall (she's around age 67 here) - Her daughter, my grandmother Helen Elizabeth Poole (around age 45 here), and my mother Judy Louise (around age 19 here).