Family Ties Kept in Family Photos

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Grandmother Arvilla Johnson shot this photo of her husband (far right), her children and grandchildren. The photo was taken in Blue Eye, Missouri, in 1960 with her Brownie box camera. The author is the grinning little girl in sunglasses. Patsy Bell Hobson

When someone asks where I’m from, I don’t think of my city, state or even country. I think of an old boot box my grandmother kept under her bed. It’s my grandmother’s connection to this old box that makes me realize that it’s who, not where, I come from that really matters. For in this timeworn cardboard box, Grandmother kept our family ties together, generation layered upon generation of snapshots, studio portraits and school pictures. Maybe she took comfort in the fact that, like a mother hen, her chicks were gathered close and safe at night. Perhaps she slept better knowing her entire family was as close as that old boot box. 

Born early in the previous century, my grandmother has lived through some of humanity’s most rapidly changing times. Her life spanned a girlhood trip in a covered wagon – on a family voyage from the Arkansas Ozarks to Oklahoma – to a jet ride on a Boeing 747. There were days when the only food her family ate was what they grew and harvested from the rocky soils of the Arkansas family farm; now her grandchildren ship her fresh-picked Florida citrus or today's salmon catch from the Pacific coast.

Grandmother’s first child was born at home with the assistance of the nearest neighbor-midwife in 1931. By mid-century, the sixth child was born in a hospital. When I ask about her children’s birth certificates, her frail bent finger taps on a crackled leather-bound book. “It’s all right here,” she says. “In the family Bible.” 

While she’s witnessed a lot of changes in her life, Grandma knows that newer isn’t always better. She has shared the chapters of her life by word-of-mouth and that Bible, shunning tape recorders, videos and movie cameras in favor of flipping through withered old photographs with grandchildren sitting on her lap. Grandmother passed family news along to us through crackling telephone party lines and slow rural route mail delivery. Last year, she sent her first Internet instant message, but was underwhelmed with the process: Gossip, she says, doesn’t travel any faster on a computer than it did on a country party-line telephone.

Grandmother knows technology has helped her as she’s aged, but that doesn’t change good old-fashioned wisdom. Life-extending medical technology has given her the opportunity to pose in family photos spanning four generations. While her six children attribute her longevity to technological developments, Grandmother also cites other important contributors to her long life: Sassafras tea every spring to thin the blood; black-eyed peas for luck each New Year’s Day; getting outdoors at every opportunity.