A forgotten photo yields a family story

If I'd found it a month later, I would never have known who was in the picture.

(NOTE: This is my story created from our first Photo Story Workshop. I will be holding more in the coming months.)

I found this photo in a hand-carved gold frame tucked in a nook in the attic of our family farm in Maine. My aunt and uncle, both in their 90s, were living there at the time. They were savers. They saved letters and newspaper clippings, old wagons and old magazines. Did I say letters? Lots of letters. You might call them packrats, except there was an order and purpose to what they preserved. And my aunt knew exactly where every one of her treasures resided.

I took the photo downstairs to my aunt to ask her what it was.

She knew right away. It was a picture of the family day cruise at the Boston Harbor Pilots Association. Once a year women and children were allowed on board of the pilots’ schooner and all went out for a sea outing.

The pilots sailed the schooners sometimes 70 miles out to meet a tall ship, where, sometimes in raging seas, the pilot would board the vessel and bring it safely into Boston harbor.

“Do you know any of the people in this picture?” I asked.

“Let me see,” she said, grabbing hold of the photograph and looking closely.

“That’s your great-grandfather (the man with the dark coat and dark hat on the left) and that’s your grandfather directly behind him. Over on the left there is your great-grandmother. Now she was a fierce soul.”

I asked her what else she knew.

My great-grandfather, she said, immigrated to the U.S. from Sweden in 1862, was immediately given U.S. citizenship and was conscripted into the U.S. Navy. A few days later he was put on a ship that blockaded Charleston, S.C., at the start of the Civil War. After the war, she said, he became a seaman and later a captain of a tall ship that plied the China trade. He would be gone sometimes for two years at a time. But when he was gone my great-grandmother wanted none of the loneliness of their farm near Boston. Instead she and her son, my grandfather, would move in with relatives in Chelsea (MA) until he returned.

My grandfather, she said, would have still been an apprentice pilot in the picture which I later learned was taken in July 1900. My great-grandfather, she added, was the captain of the last schooner commissioned by the Harbor Pilots in 1907, the Varuna.

The irony of this story was that one month later my aunt went blind from macular degeneration. She was the last person alive who could have identified the people in this photograph.