Recovered family correspondence — February 8–15, 2021.
While I was working through old family photographs, I sent Jo a pair of images and asked for help identifying the people in them.
Jo identified the second photograph as Grandma Grace Zeimet with her surviving children, probably at Aunt Mary and Ida’s cabin just north of Pringle. Starting at the bottom left, she identified Ida, Grandma Grace, Inice and Mary; Peter and Leah; then Jim, Dave, Bonnie and Donna. She noted that Bud was missing from the photograph because he had died young.
Jo remembered Grandma Grace as someone everyone regarded as a saint: always kind, feeding many people during the Depression and feeding railroad hoboes who came to the back door. She said Grandma sometimes could not pull up all of the grandchildren’s names quickly and called everyone “Dolly.”
She also described the large family gatherings around Pringle: often 30 to 70 people, abundant food, a big wood cook stove and an outhouse. The women did much of the cooking and cleanup while the men talked and played cards.
I followed up to clarify one detail: when Jo said “Grandpa” joined the work in the kitchen, she meant Cyril Fuller. Jo wrote that Cyril would put on a flowery apron and wade in. Because he had been a butcher, he was an accomplished carver.
Jo also thought the man shown from the back in one of the photographs was Cyril Fuller. That identification remains a family-memory identification rather than a separately verified one.
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