I don’t usually take pictures with people in them except by accident.  I am nervous about asking for permission, as this might change what I found interesting about them.   And if I don’t ask for permission I  might be stealing their soul.  But I did take these photos with people in them recently, because there was something that I found interesting about each of these folks.

I was sitting eating lunch alone and this young person sat near me and started drawing.   The sketchbook had lovely line drawings on another page, but the artist was working on big graphic blocks of color in this drawing.  I did ask permission.

I noticed this teacher leading a school group because she was wearing this beautiful bright dress against a backdrop of her identically dressed students.

I saw this guy and was fascinated by the fact that he was wearing a Lenin tie clip and had these Soviet medals on his lapels.   So I trawled through my memory on how to ask if I could take a photo in Russian.  (Russian is a very tongue-twisting language).  As it turned out he was an English communist going home from a rally to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.  I would have found out more, but my stop came up.

I was waiting for the bus when this guy showed up on the street corner.  I just loved his outfit, I thought it looked quite theatrical.  Then he waved down a taxi and was out of there before my bus ever showed up.

It was the shoes on the woman that caught my eye as she walked by.  Patent leather Vivienne Westwoods that surely would have broken my ankle if I had been wearing them.   I don’t know why the guy turned around, maybe he is a politician and was worried or married.  (And he was wearing ordinary lace-up Oxfords).

Perhaps the most unusual person (?) I saw was Death.  All the people around him seem unfazed and uninterested.  I guess that they figured he was not coming for them right now, so it was okay that he was in their midst.  😉

I did attempt to visit some of our local ghosts at the end of summer.  The city cemetery was offering a “meet and greet” with the spirits of some locals of note, and this sounded like a good opportunity to get to know them.

Last up on the tour was the founder of the city and his missus.  He was an abolitionist, joined the Union Army and made the rank of General in the American Civil War.  He built a mansion for his missus, but she did not care for the locals altitude and moved to London (a local school is named for her).   He is remembered with a statue of him and his horse that sits in the middle of an intersection to this day.  (His ghost did not address the issue of whether this is a good idea.)

This guy was the second father founder important figure in the  history of our city.  He had come to the area to work as a carpenter.  So he did this sort of thing in the winter, but during the summers he took off and went prospecting in the mountains.   He did find silver,  started a mine and became a multimillionaire.   As he had no descendants he used his money to start a charity that cared for the aged and others, and the foundation he created cares for the disabled to this day.

Captain Edward Sheldon is a lesser known person who ended up living here.   He was also an abolitionist, and was once arrested in Iowa helping escaped slaves get to Canada.   He was tried for his crime, but a sympathetic jury refused to convict him, and the former slaves were able to continue on to Canada.  He latter got the rank of captain in the Civil War, and after the war he moved here.

There were other local ghosts on the tour, but the day was quite hot and I had not had lunch.  So I contented myself with meeting these four ghosts.

I encountered these pioneering spirits when I went to the hardware store.  Their stories are unknown, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves anyway (and perhaps they needed light bulbs too).

I last posted a corner of a room, and just barely visible at the bottom of one are a collection of photos.   Here’s the scoop on a few of the vintage photos.

This is my paternal grandmother in about 1925 when she was a 15 year old factory girl.   She had gotten dressed up to go to a portrait studio to have this picture made.  She was a first-generation American and was a native Russian speaker (although I never ever heard her do this).  Her father was a coal miner and they lived in a small town across the river from St. Louis.  She had moved to the city to work and lived with her older sister.

At the time this photo was taken she was making shoes, she later switched to making electrical fuses.   She worked in a factory until she had a heart attack, then she sat on the sofa reading movie magazines.  We always lived near her and I saw her frequently.  I love this photo because she is so unfamiliar from the woman I knew.

This is my maternal great-grandmother who was born in 1863.   I found this picture in a book on the Tuscarora tribe and it looks to be from about 1930.   She had two families, the author of the book was  a descendant from the first family.   I don’t know what happened to that first husband, or the second, but my grandfather was from her third husband, the second family.   She lived with my grandfather and grandmother on the Seneca reservation until after my Mom was born.   Then she married again and moved back to the Tuscarora rez.

This is a picture of her grandfather, my great-great-great grandfather and I got this from the collection of a library in Niagara Falls.   He was born in 1815 and died in 1899.   I did not have any family stories of him, but I found him when I was doing some genealogical research.  He was apparently the first Native American deacon on the Tuscarora reservation and was active in the Temperance movement.    In contrast to life on the Tuscarora reservation,  in the 1892 special census of the Seneca reservation, it is described as being full of pagans.  Of course by the time my mom was born on the Seneca rez there weren’t too many (or any) at least openly pagans left.

I was able to share these pictures of her relatives with my mom when she was alive.   Because she was the youngest in a second family,  everyone was gone by the time she was growing up.   When she was dating my dad he took her around to meet all of his relatives,  and Mom thought it would be great to be in large family.   After she married she found out about all the family feuds my grandmother had with everyone else, so we seldom got to see the nearby relatives.