This Week in Genealogy...

Last weekend, we began to search through boxes of old pictures, documents, and mementos that both of our parents inherited from their respective parents.  Here's one set of our great-grandparents in some of the oldest pictures from our collections:

A and H with our grandmother E, second half of 1923.

Both A and H immigrated from Finland in the 1910s.  We've discovered that they arrived separately and eventually met in Maine, where they married.  Their marriage certificate, which we found on ancestry.com, lists all of their parents' names, which no one in our family ever knew before.  Neither of their parents immigrated with them, so we're wondering why both A and H elected to come to America alone as young people.  Did they each come with a church group, with cousins, with friends, or by themselves?  Where did they go when they arrived, and what did they do to support themselves in the years before they were married?  We're currently trying to trace each of their immigration records, but it is proving considerably more difficult than we anticipated.

H with our grandmother E in 1924.

Their daughter, our grandmother E, was born in 1923. She was an only child, and even after she was married, her parents lived close by and remained an active part of their grandchildren's lives. Our father was very close to his grandmother H, and when I was born on her 89th birthday, I was given her name as my middle name. Ashley was later given H's middle name as her own, so we both feel a special connection to H and all that we're now learning about her, even though neither of us had the privilege to know her.

H in the 1920s.  We haven't yet been able to place where

or exactly when this picture was taken.

As a minor fashion-related observation, note that H wears the same watch in each of the pictures.  In our grandparents' wedding picture, the same watch appears on her daughter E's wrist, evidently our grandmother's very special "something old."  Now if only we could find that watch...