Tag: <span>howell</span>

Sepia Saturday 333

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Another Sepia Saturday, this week featuring a prompt image of a water mill taken 136 years ago.  I didn’t have any mills in my family photographs, but I do have lots and lots of buildings.  Here, we even have two of the same building, taken at slightly different times and from different angles.  I know I’ve posted about Nellie Eimer before, a woman who shows up in lots of photos, but I don’t quite know the specifics of her relationship with my family.  I suspect she was a family friend, but the circumstances of how they met aren’t clear.  Anyway, this was Nellie’s home where she lived with her father and later, her husband, until her death in 1930.  The address is 3 Dixon Ave, Carbondale, PA, and as far as I can tell, the house still exists, though it’s a smaller street that Google Street View seems to have skipped, so I can’t tell if the house still looks like this or not!  The photo on the left was likely taken between 1914 when her mother (Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smith) died and 1920 when her father (William Howell) died since that’s Nellie and her father sitting on the porch.  The label on the back of this reads, “Nellie Eimer and her father, home in Carbondale, PA.”  The one on the right may have been  taken between 1920 and 1930 since the man seated on the porch has darker hair and was likely her husband, Frank Eimer.  The label on the back reads, “This is our home,” with, “Aunt Nellie Eimer, Carbondale, PA” written below in a different hand and different ink.  If the photos were taken 10-20 years apart, it appears not much changed during that time between the flower boxess out front, paint and whatnot.  It’s really rather neat to see them side by side like this and I’m really rather curious to see if the house still looks the same or not.  It’s possible to sneak in a side trip some time since it’s only 2.5 hours away, if we ever happen to be driving past that area.  I’ll have to report back if that happens!

Sepia Saturday 252: Help yourself, name tags, 50th Anniversaries, serving line, marquee, pots

You know when you feel like you’re on a roll with themes?  Yep!  Two weeks in a row and I feel like I’ve got a perfect photo for the theme.  Even better, this is an update to an older post.

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While these two folks don’t appear to be related to me, they played a part in my great grandmother’s life and kept in contact for a number of years.  I know I’ve mentioned before about how blood relatives weren’t the only people in the lives of our ancestors and it’s easy to forget that neighbors and friends played a role in their lives as well.  This is another example of that.  My great grandmother, Olga (Kitko) Powis, apparently referred to the daughter of Mr & Mrs William Howell as “Aunt” Nellie Eimer, but I don’t think they were actually related.  The term appears to have been symbolic.  Nellie was the daughter of William H Howell and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smith who were married in 1863 in England and celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on 17 September 1913, just a year and a few months before Lizzie died on 1 December 1914.  Both came to the USA from Shropshire, England, bringing their two daughters, Nellie and Sarah, with them.  I found an article about their celebration in the newspaper, and you can even see in the photo above that the roses mentioned in the article appear on William’s jacket and Lizzie’s lap.  Pretty neat to be able to connect the article to the photo to have a very exact date for the photo!  From other photos, I know William made several visits to my great grandmother and her mother over the years – he shows up in a few photos with them before he passed away in 1920.  The trip is about 3.5 hours by car today, so I have to imagine they had some sort of special relationship to make that kind of journey a number of times though I’m not sure how or where they crossed paths.  William and Lizzie arrived sometime around 1882 or so, and Olga’s mother Jessie didn’t arrive until about 1890.  Jessie was only two years older than Nellie, but they lived in very different areas in England.  I’d love to figure it out one day, but it doesn’t appear that the Howells have any living descendants.  Nellie never had children, and while her sister Sarah had two children (Wilfred McCoy and Lucy Elizabeth McCoy Knickerbocker) it appears that Lucy’s child Frank Knickerbocker never had any children, and neither did Wilfred.  It’s sort of weird to think that folks who made such an impression on the lives of my ancestors have no living descendants of their own.

William Howell anniversary

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