I have a scrapbook my Mom made me several years ago, filled with pictures going back a couple generations. I love looking at them, marvelling how much I look just like my Mom, how much my cousin Joey looks just like Grandpa, how much my Mom
and I look like my Grandma, how there's this one picture of my Grandpa as a young teen that reminds me so much of my Uncle Jeff . . .
et cetera,
et cetera . . .
There's one person throughout the pictures who captures my attention the most. My Great Grandma Helen, my Mom's Mom's Mom. :-) She just seems to have such an outgoing personality, so full of life and all that.
She's the toddler in this picture, standing next to her mother, Jennie, and her younger sibling Leslie (don't know if it's a boy or girl -- the dress doesn't tell you anything in pictures from this era, and neither does the name Leslie!)
Isn't she just so cute -- like a mischievous elf or something?
This is Grandma Helen and her long time boyfriend of four years. Apparently he was a pretty angry drunk, and would regularly drink too much, get mad and leave town for awhile. Once after he left, a friend of Helen's approached her and said, "I know a nice fellow you could go out with . . ." Four months later she was married to Grandpa Movell.
I like this picture, 'cause for some odd reason it reminds me of some movie set of some old western movie or something.
We have some great pictures of Grandma Helen just hanging out with friends, which I think is pretty cool, 'cause at a time when people weren't just walking around with point and shoot cameras, it feels very fortunate that we have like 30+ pictures of this woman. Here she is with an unnamed friend (she's on the right).
One of my favorites -- this is Grandma Helen (on the right again), with her sister in law Alda (who was married to Grandpa Movell's brother Cloy -- and yes, those people should've lost the right to name their own children) :-) Sassy, right? :-)
These next three are from Movell & Helen's honeymoon.
Behind them is the new car they bought for $900.00.
Here she is on her honeymoon, sporting a cool tie and tall boots. I'm curious where they went on their honeymoon . . .
Here she is riding on Movell's shoulders. It stands to reasons that honeymooners throughout the ages have been fairly jovial and carefree -- but how often do you see old black and white pictures of new brides on their husband's shoulders like this?
Here they are sometime after getting married.
Grandma Helen, their baby (my Great Aunt Zan), my Grandma Kay, and Grandpa Movell.
You can't see it quite as much in that last picture, but in this picture it is crystal clear where my Mom comes from -- she is the spitting image of my Grandma Kay (left, top corner).
So anyway, those are pictures of my Great Grandma Helen. Neither her or my Great Grandma Movell lived very long, both dying before even my own mother was born. (He died around the age of 45, she died around 49.) Helen was born in 1906 in Lindon, Utah, the oldest of six children (two passed away in childhood). Her father Frank left when she was young to serve an LDS mission, but suffered a ruptured appendix and came home early. They moved to Salt Lake City, while her father worked as a street car conductor, until there was an accident on one of the cars one day, and he was very badly hurt, having to have a steel plate put into his head. His hearing was ruined, and he could no longer work on the street cars, so they moved to Standardville (I have NO idea where that is) where they ran a boarding house. Helen worked as a teenager in the local ice cream parlor, as well as pumping the player piano at the silent movies on Saturday nights. She was known to be quite beautiful and had "many beaus" (as one of her written histories records).
Her soon to be husband, Movell, was working as a coal miner and met her right after she'd broken up with her old fiancee (the mean drunk one). They were married by the Justice of the Peace in Price, UT and ended up living there for a few years until they moved to Salt Lake where they both went to school -- him to become a barber, her to become a beautician. Grandma Helen stayed home with her baby (my Grandma Kay), and Grandpa Movell worked at his barbershop -- where he ended up being converted to the LDS Church by some of his customers, and the two of them were eventually sealed in the Salt Lake Temple in March of 1941.
While raising her kids she was known as an immaculate housekeeper (a gene my Mom got, and I did not). She loved to sew, (another gene that my Mom got and I didn't) and would look at dresses in stores, then come home and make a perfect replica. She was barely 5'2", and everyone called her "Little Helen" (yet another gene that alluded me). In 1950, her and her husband built a double business building where she had her beauty shop and he ran his barbershop, and she loved going to work each day with him. Unfortunately, Grandpa died when he was only 45, and she spent a few years spending time with her daughters' and their fledgling families, but just a few years later she was diagnosed with cancer, and with her youngest daughter (who'd moved back home to take care of her while sick) and her own parents living in her home, she passed away. My own Grandma would've only been about 23 years old when she lost her second parent, and my own Mom never knew her mother's parents. It's one of those things that makes me feel amazingly blessed that my girls know all four of their grandparents, and have spent time and holidays and Sunday visits with 5 of their 8 great grandparents.
Oh, and semi-related . . . Grandma Helen's great Grandma (so my great, great, great, great Grandma) was named Sophia -- it's where we got Ellie's middle name. Greg and I joke that we had to go back that far to find a usable name -- but seriously, just on my side of the family we have family names like Sophia's own husband, Spicer, her daughter, Irinda, not to mention names like: Movell, Cloy, Cordelia, Sophronia, Belva, Olive, Petronella, Ingeborg (that's a woman), Gunhild (also a woman), my own Grandpa's name is Pennell (and his twin brother's name is Parnell). Then there's mine and Greg's favorite names -- the couple who probably got married 'cause they'd found another person who understood the pain of being unfortunately named: Wilmurth LaMaude and Mahonri Moriancumer. Poor Greg and I had to pour over decades worth of family names to before finding a middle name for Ellie :-)
