Young Sandy

 

I thank my cousin Stuart Brewster for sharing this early image of me.  He took the photo at Pine Knoll, perhaps at one of the summer picnics there.  He doesn't recall the date.  

This might have been taken on or about my 2nd birthday. That's my guess.  I was born in July 1943. 

Today I looked in a photo album of my father's photos of me from babyhood on.  I found 3 photos in which I look similar. The date was June 1945, just weeks before my 2nd birthday.  

[Click to enlarge]

You might wonder why this page of photos skips from June 1945 to a November snow scene of our home, without any photos of my 2nd birthday. It could be because my father usually took slides, not photographs. It is also possible that any photos taken might have been lost in the jumble of photo packages in the drawer where my parents tossed all processed photos.  Or maybe some photos never got into that drawer? My parents NEVER created albums, and rarely wrote dates or annotations on the photos.

The album page that you see above was created by me, years later, when I was pregnant and curious to see my own baby pictures. So, on my next visit to Danvers, I dug into that old drawer and spent hours trying to sort photos and determine dates. There were lots of baby photos, but which ones were of me and which of my sister?  Ultimately I turned the photos over and used the film processing numbers to group photos from each roll of film together. THAT really helped!  Usually in each roll of film there was enough context to help date the sequence.  After all that sorting, I selected some photos I liked and put them into a real album. My mother was tickled that I had created my own "baby album!"