Family History Find of the Day

University of Illinois YW and YMCA Picnic, West End Park, May 1897 FJ Bird and D. Clara Hartrick identified in white frame Bird family/P.L. Embley collection Great photo, isn't it? I 've been fascinated by this image since I was a child. It belonged to my grandfather, Marion Taylor Bird. I always thought the photo had something to do with Warrenville (Illinois); I think it was in a box with photos of Warrenville ancestors .   I wondered about the people in the photo - who they were and why they had gathered. Whose photo was it before it was my grandfather's? There were many very old photos in his collection that had belonged to great-grand-aunts and uncles and cousins. It was not immediately obvious that this photo had belonged to my grandfather's father, and that it was deeply significant to him.  About a week ago, I was reviewing my great-grandfather FJ Bird's 1944 memoir narrative - I can't even remember what I was looking for - when I noticed something that ...

Daily State Register  [Springfield] 9 Dec. 1902, p.5.  There haven't been many epidemics that have impacted me in my lifetime. Over the past year or two, we have chuckled at the way doctors' offices and hospitals quiz patients about recent travels to West Africa. When my husband answered "yes" (following a business trip to Nigeria), no one seemed to know what to do. Ebola was a serious risk in a number of parts of the world, but not within thousands of miles of where we lived. Diphtheria, on the other hand, was a very real threat to families and communities at the turn of the 20th century and for centuries before that.  A diphtheria epidemic in the Springfield, Illinois area took the life of my great grandmother's niece. Newspaper, census, and interment records help tell the story.  "Diphtheria at Keefner Home - Contagion's Second Visit There, Other Residences Quarantined." Daily Illinois State Journal  [Springfield] 11 Dec...

Clara Amy Smith Bird was born in 1841 in frontier Illinois. Her parents were Joel and Amy Bartholomew Smith, early pioneers of DuPage County, Illinois. This photo of her is dated 1891. I had the photo for quite a few years before I noticed the small white ribbon pinned to her dress. It didn't look like a piece of jewelry or other embellishment. Why was she wearing a white ribbon? While scanning old family photos in Chicago a couple of years ago, I came across this picture of a group of fourteen women. There was no explanation of the grouping on the back of the photo, and I took it to be some kind of family gathering. I'd looked at that image quite a few times before I noticed the photo that one woman near the front is holding. When I enlarged it enough to take a good look at the small photo in the woman's hand, I was amazed to realize that I had seen that face before! It was the same 1891 photo I had of my great-great-grandmother, Clara Smith Bird. Only then...