Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Summering at Mormon Island




The Armchair Genealogist asked us to view summer through the eyes of our ancestors.  This got me to remembering a photo from the box of my grandparents, Charles Albert Badgley and Ethyl Maxine Shelton Badgley.  Even if I do say so myself, they were really beautiful people, inside and out.  Nana was a model before she married, showing off fancy dresses for Bergdorf’s in San Francisco.  Pakak owned a printing company with his brother.



The back of one of the photos in the set says “July 11, Mormon Island.”  No year, but it’s likely around 1935 or ‘36, as in one photo there is a child is in Nana’s lap that is likely Judy, born in 1934.  Mormon Island was once along the American River near Sacramento, California.  It no longer exists as now it is under Folsom Lake, which was completed in 1955.  Mormon Island was once a mining community, named for the abundance of Mormon immigrants seeking the fortune of the Gold Rush.

Here are a couple other photos from that set of pictures taken on July 11 of some year in the past of my ancestors. 



Looks to me like a family picnic, but not sure who’s family.  In the photo with the older woman, the man lying near her is George Shuger, a family friend and much later in life (in her 70s and 80s), Nana’s boyfriend.  Perhaps this was a picnic with the Shuger family?  Or maybe this is my great grandmother, Minnie May Irish Badgley.  It doesn’t look like her from the photos I have, but I don’t have photos of her with white hair, so I'm just not sure.

It’s fun to see pictures of families together doing the same things that families do today—eating, swimming and posing.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!  And tell us about a day in the summer of one of your ancestors...

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