A dress with history

Why yes, I am still alive. Thank you for asking. I didn't tell you, but I was pregnant for pretty much all of last year. It made for a really lazy year, photographically speaking (and otherwise). But I'm feeling motivated again, and I'm hoping to get some things cooking for this year. I'm starting out by sharing some pictures of my youngest daughter, Robyn. I don't usually talk a lot about my photos (I think), but please indulge me for a few minutes this time.

There's a history to what Robyn is wearing. My grandmother passed away at the end of the year. My daughter was only about five weeks old. Family was the most important thing to my grandma. I had the opportunity to visit her a couple of weeks before she passed, and I took the time to ask her for any parting words of wisdom she wanted to share with my siblings and me. "There's nothing like family. Keep 'em close." That's all she had to say. Her apartment was full of photos of family members -- her daughters and grandchildren. Every available surface had a picture frame on it. I noticed one old photograph tucked behind other frames on a top shelf. I pulled it down and asked her about it. It was old and browned, and the young child in it had that serious look of family history photographs. It was my grandmother as a baby (I would guess around eight months old). The thing that makes that extraordinary is that my grandmother was adopted when she was two years old. The photograph pre-dated that.

As my mother went through her mother's effects, she found the dress that my grandma wore in the photograph I found. Also extraordinary, that she still had that dress, through the adoption and her seventy-six years of life. It is crocheted by hand, and my mom supposed that it had been made my my grandma's biological grandmother (based on the little history that we know).

My parents came to visit me last week, and my mom brought the dress (and bonnet) along with her, having cleaned them. Getting to take these pictures of my daughter was a joyous, yet very emotional, experience for me. Six generations of women are represented in these pictures.