My Life through Portraits......

2 months old

This picture was taken shortly before entering the hospital for the first time. When I was 6mo old, it was discovered that there was a blockage preventing me from urinating and causing the infections.

My 2 cousins on my mother's side and I are about the same age and got baptized on the same day. We belonged to a church which believed that babies needed to be baptized.

I was 10months old when I learned to walk. This picture was taken shortly after I got out of the hospital for allergy problems. They thought I was allergic to cows milk and put me on goats milk. I enjoyed playing with our pet goat when I was young! It was trained like a dog!

My grandmother Ford lived in the house behind and across from the alley. We lived in the right side of the house in front and to the left of this picture. She is the grandmother who taught me to love and obey the Lord.

 

I was almost 2 and my sister was almost 1yr old. we were living across the ally-way from our grandmother Ford's house

 This is the yard to the first house my parents bought, one room downstairs and one upstairs. The little building is the outhouse. The pole is the clothes line.

We used kerosine and wood to heat and cook. There was a pump outside in the middle of the yard to get water. I used to climb a high stool and try to get the water myself.

A dear sweet elderly neighbor woman was like a grandmother to us and took these pictures of us. Kolleen was 3 and I was 4yrs old

My sister is 4 and I am 5 here. My father build a 2 car, cinder-block garage and turned it into a house when I was 4yrs old. Somewhere my mother has a picture of me helping with the mortar. When I got older I like to help him fix the car.

 

This was our car which had a rusty back seat floor. YIKES!

  We always had animals of one kind or other, puppies, kittens, chickens, rabbits and a goat!

 When we got a phone, dad designed an opening between the kitchen and living room to answer it from either side of the wall.

After we no longer raised chickens, our father let us use the coop for a play house and we put these toys in it and played in it all summer with the neighbor children. 

 

 We could see all the way from RomePa to Towanda PA on top of the hill at my great grandmother Elliot's farm.

 We inherited when I was 10yrs old. This is the living room with it's pot belly stove and sliding doors. This was the original wall paper. The stairs can be seen through the door to the hall.

My dad found some cheap, silver paint to paint the house and sold 'the farm' when I was 16ys old. The floor plan of this house is almost the same as the house we live in now, which is why I felt like I had come home the first time I walked into this house! I was at peace there.... Miss it. One can never go back, but it lives peacefully in my memory! Easter Egg Hunts, Aunts, uncles and cousins vacationing with us, deer hunting and butchering in the kitchen, chasing and riding the 'old gray mare' which had been put out to pasture, running from the bull which treed my sister and cousin and almost gored me to the fence, picking every type of fruit one can imagine including nuts, gathering every type of flower which can come back each year, laying in the sun, chasing wild animals, playing horse shoes, roasting marshmallows over an open fire in the evenings, catching fire flies and any other type of insect we could find, playing in the barn, swinging from vines in the woods, gathering ground evergreens to make wreaths, for Christmas, dragging an old wagon from the woods with the help of all the cousins, alone in the woods reading books about horses, telling ghost stories with flashlights till midnight, honey bees in the out house, rats and snakes in the wood shed, playing cards with everyone around a HUGE dining room table, no central utilities, except cold water from a spring in the warmer weather, gathering water from another spring 1/4mi away when that spring was left uncover and got contaminated (we pretended that we were pioneer children), playing hide and seek after dark, not worrying about how much noise we made, exploring the treasures in the attic of which I still have the spinning wheel, and on and on and on.....

 11yrs old with my first professional hair cut and perm.

 12 yrs old in our Easter attires. My mother helped raise the two girls in the picture.

 13 yrs old 8th grade class picture

 When I turned 16 we moved to a farm
and bought some cows and horses
to go along with the cat, dog, chickens and rabbits!
At night, when the wind blew through the trees in front of the house,
I fell peacefully asleep.
Sorry, I know we have a front picture of the house, but can't find it.

This is my 17yrs old, High School graduation picture.