Category: Genealogy

I usually try not to post about living people since it feels a little insensitive, but on the other hand, living people might want to find and see these photos, and I did see a great news story about a group of people who post photos from lost phones and cameras and try to reunite them with their owner, so in that spirit, here’s a good one!  The Walker family isn’t related, though my grandmother knew them and even saved some photos of them.  I realized recently, when scrolling through the thousands of scans I have from her that I had both the printed photos and the negatives, AND they had labels on the back!

So, we have two photos that appear to be taken in front of the same house, labelled as Davie and Susie Walker.  Assuming this was about 1950, grandma would’ve been about 19-20 or so.  Then I realized there were negatives that matched, and there were originally more in the series (click the smaller thumbnails to see the larger images).

The film size for these was 616, so they were probably taken with a Kodak Brownie Target 616 camera or equivalent.  They’re just massive negatives, but they scan up really beautifully.  Having all these photos, I went hunting down a census, bearing in mind this was probably in/around Clearfield County, PA, and the kids should be on the 1950 census.  Walker was a pretty common surname, but Clearfield County is fairly sparsely populated in comparison to say Philadelphia, so it should be possible to narrow this down.  Hit paydirt pretty quickly and found Ivan and Florence (Broberg) Walker with two children, Susan K and David Lee Walker, ages 8 and 2 respectively in 1950.  In the photos above, the teenager in the peasant top and skirt is my grandma, and I’d hazard a guess that the man in glasses is Ivan Walker.  The house was a bit tricky to track down since a lot of those roads weren’t named/numbered until the last decade or two, but fortunately the census taker was pretty great at writing down directions.  I did manage to find it at 12 Walker Street in the Houtzdale, PA mailing zipcode.  The census refers to the location as “West Moshannon” and I actually know exactly where this house is located since it’s off a fairly major road I’ve traveled over many, many times.  They were living across from Florence’s parents as per the census, and there are two more photos from the film scans that appear to be taken the same date/time given the lighting conditions.  The first house below is the one just to the left of the Walker residence, now 28 Walker Street.

I couldn’t identify the house photo on the right since there’s no google street view out in that area (it’s fairly remote), and it’s possible that in the prior 70 years, it may have been demolished or renovated extensively.  She may have taken the photo   How grandma knew these folks, I’m not entirely sure.  It’s possible it was through church or family friends or something, but they were important enough to her to capture on film and tuck away in a box of memories!

Sometimes you come across something that seems like a random snapshot, but is a pretty neat photo once you look closely!  This photo shows my great grandmother holding a mirror with grandma and her sister shown in the mirror’s reflection.  As far as a date, I’d say around 1945 or so given grandma’s age.  Since this is basically a selfie, we get an idea of the camera she was using which is some sort of box camera, but it’s hard to tell which one exactly.  I didn’t find a corresponding printed photograph, so it’s pretty fortunate that this negative was kept in the box of photos!