Every picture tells a story

Researching my family for my memoir has been a labor of love.  I joined Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com. I have sent many emails to entities like the Clinton Public Library, the Vermillion County Clerk, and the Indiana Health Department. I Googled a lot. And I interviewed my family members, including my mom, siblings, cousins, and my aunt.

If only I had done it sooner, in my mom’s case. Her dementia seems to have progressed rapidly after a particularly clear day in December of 2024 when I asked her to tell me about meeting Dad and the day they got married.

She met Dad when she was 17, the summer before her senior year at Clinton High School. She was the seventh of eight children and about to be the first one of them to graduate. Mom was working as a waitress in a diner, and Dad started coming in pretty regularly to either eat or get a bag lunch to take to work. At 29, he looked much younger and was very handsome. I’m not sure when she found out he was divorced and had four kids. But the romance advanced, and then she missed a period.

In October, everything was set for their wedding day. She and Dad each had a friend as a witness, which was required in 1956. They had a preacher lined up, and other family and friends were meeting them afterward for a small reception. But when they got to the preacher’s house, they were turned away after he learned that Dad had been married before and was divorced. The sinner needed to look elsewhere!

They had to call in a second-string minister who was up for the job. “Give me an hour,” he had told them. So, the small wedding party headed to the new guy’s house.

Mom’s mom was also there to show that the young bride had her parents’ consent, even though her dad was none too happy about his 17-year-old daughter marrying a 29-year-old divorced father of four.

Ironic, since Grandpa was 11 years older than Grandma and they met because their widowed parents got married. Yep, they were stepsiblings! Plus, Grandpa’s brother married Grandma’s sister. All their kids are double cousins. My mom’s sister Shirley always says, “The Benson family tree is pretty straight.”

Anyway, my parents got married, and 11 months later, my brother Dick was born. Yeah, the missed period was a false alarm. Which was good because Mom wasn’t quite so pregnant when she walked in her graduation commencement, the first and only of the Benson clan to do so. 

I’d heard most of this story before, but loved hearing my mom retell it. 

Pictures in a shoebox  

Sadly, because of her dementia, the window for getting any more details from Mom is closed pretty tight. My cousins have been helpful, sending me some great old photos and sharing their memories.  

My siblings and I have an abundance of family photos since years ago Mom went through old photo albums and divvied the pictures up among us. Even so, she still had a shoebox of random photos when she moved out of her house. It included senior pictures of her classmates from the class of 1957, duplicates of other photos, blurry photos not worthy of putting in albums, and some mysteries to solve.  

As I shuffled through them, I found a couple of photos from what was obviously a special occasion because they were in color. The date on the pictures said November 1956. I figured out they were taken on Mom and Dad’s wedding day in late October of that year. Dad isn’t in any of the prints I found, but Mom is pictured in one with our Aunt Dorothy and two children I didn’t recognize. I took a picture with my phone and sent it to siblings and cousins, asking if anyone knew who the kids were.  

There were a lot of guesses from my siblings, but the mystery was solved when Diana, a cousin on my mom’s side, said they were Uncle Jack’s kids from his first marriage. Both my parents have brothers named Jack. This Jack is Mom’s eldest brother, who had been in the Army and had met his first wife in Germany. His son and daughter were the kids in that picture... so mystery solved.

The next mystery picture also featured kids I didn’t recognize.

This picture was taken in our backyard at Summit Grove of three kids. Two girls standing by a boy on a tricycle. They looked alike, so obviously siblings, and they were overdressed for a day in our backyard. The two girls wore what looked like homemade dresses and had matching checkered kerchiefs tied in their hair. The boy wore an oversized button-up shirt and dress pants rolled up at the ankles. They were posing, holding hands and smiling for the camera.  

It must have been a special day because there are pictures of my sister Lynn and me in dresses, too. I can tell they were taken the same day because the boy is riding that tricycle on the sidewalk behind us. The date on the edge of the pictures says “June 1968.” In those days, the dates just meant when the film was developed. So, when were these photos actually taken, I wondered.  

We had moved to Summit Grove in October of 1965, so the picture was obviously taken after that. We were all dressed for warm weather, which put us at least in 1966.

It was definitely our backyard. The metal tub that was carried in on Sundays for our baths was hanging on one side of the porch, and the heating oil tank that we later painted with an elephant face was on the other side. The persimmon tree that we climbed and hung a basketball backboard in was behind the trio of kids and was full of leaves. And my brother Alan could be seen looking out from the porch. But who the heck are these kids?

A developing mystery

Again, I used my phone to take a picture of the photo and texted it to my siblings to see if anyone had any guesses. Since the photo was taken before 1968, Steve, Jeff, and Karen, the three youngest, born in 1965, 1967, and 1969, respectively, had no idea.

My older brother Dick was the first to say he thought it was the “Elvingston kids.” The Elvingston* family had moved into Summit Grove in ‘66 or ‘67. There were five kids, and their house was two blocks away and was the size of a shoebox. They must have all shared one bedroom. And I thought WE were poor!

Alan said he remembered it was his tricycle the boy was riding, and that he had ridden it back home to their shoebox house that day.

“Just look how sad I am up on the porch!” Alan texted. He said he remembered that Danny (our half-brother) had to go down to their house and get his trike back. “I hated that kid,” Alan joked. As the texts continued, he changed that sentiment.

Someone remembered that two of the children from that family had died in a car wreck. No one had a clear memory of when or whether it was a boy and a girl or two girls. Alan was sure it wasn’t his tricycle nemesis, who he remembered was named Billy, because they were in kindergarten together the fall of 1968.  And Dick remembered the oldest brother, John. So, the consensus was it must have been two of the girls.

This mystery was the catalyst for my membership on Newspapers.com. It didn’t take too long to find an article from November 2, 1967, in the Terre Haute Tribune. The headline read “2 Rural Clinton Sisters Die in Auto Crash.”  

The article said, “Pronounced dead on arrival at Vermillion County Hospital… were Cathy Ann Elvingston, 11, and her sister, Mary Lou Elvingston, six.”

Their mother, five-year-old William, and another sister, Margaret Ann, who was nine, were also in the car and were injured.

Judging by the height difference between the two girls in the picture, they were the six-year-old Mary Lou, who died, and the nine-year-old Margaret Ann, who lived.   

I sent the article to my siblings, and we all let it sink in. Mom had taken that picture in the summer or Spring of 1967, and the youngest girl in the photo had died before Mom got the film developed.  

Because I can’t ask her (remember that closed window?), I can only imagine how our mom must have reacted to getting the pictures back. Seeing those kids among a group of photos of her own children. Did she remember why she took their picture that day? Did she cry when she saw it? Odds are she cried. Mom cried over a lot less.  

Latent images and faded memories 

In college, I learned the term “latent images” for photos on undeveloped film. I took many photography classes and worked in the audio-visual center. I processed film and made black-and-white prints in the darkroom. I love photography, and the idea of images on undeveloped film is intriguing. Kind of like the tree falling in the woods. Wait. That was philosophy class.

A latent image is an invisible image produced by the exposure to light of a photosensitive material such as photographic film. When photographic film is developed, the exposed areas darken and form a visible image.  

So, until it was developed, Mary Lou’s image was the same as her brother’s and sister’s. Latent. Invisible. Once the print was made, she became a ghost. The sister who died. Yeah, my mom definitely cried.

My continued research on the Elvingston family has revealed that the entire family who lived in the shoebox house in Summit Grove is now gone. The taller girl in the picture, Margaret Ann, was the last to pass away at age 55 in 2013. Her obituary, in the same Terre Haute newspaper as the auto crash article, says, “She was preceded in death by her parents, two brothers, and two sisters.”

When I found the picture of those three smiling kids, it was just another mystery to solve: Who are they? I had no idea the photo had outlived them. That they now only exist in memory - remembered by the photo, by their families, by my mom (when she could still remember), by my siblings and me. And, if you've stuck around to the end of the story, by you.

*For the descendants of the family’s privacy, their name has been changed.