Did Your Family Have a Tradition of Visiting on Sundays?

Did your family have a tradition going visiting on Sundays? That was the case with many of my family members.

Frequent visitors to the Wilmer, Alabama, farm home of N.B. "Bonie" Pierce and Julia L. Moody included Arvis Brown. Arvis appears in the above photo with a woman identified only by her last name of Tanner.

Notice that they were photographed with a field crop behind them, but it is difficult to identify the kind of plants growing there. Also Arvis and the young woman appear to be dressed in their Sunday finery. Perhaps they dropped by the Pierce home for a visit after church. This was a common custom among young people of the time.

Who Is That Guy In All the Family Photos?

Ina Mae Pierce (1903-1977), daughter of N. B. "Bonie" Pierce and Julia L. Moody of Wilmer, Alabama, appears in a number of family photos with Clifford York.

She and Clifford appear in the top two of these three photos. The woman in the bottom photo is unidentified. She may be a relative of Ina Mae's or Clifford's, or just one of their friends. These photos were probably taken in the 1920s.

The top photo appears to be the earliest (and the poorest quality) of the photos. The couple may have been teenagers when they posed for this photo, perhaps along the dirt road in front of the family farmhouse.

In the middle photo, Ina Mae and Clifford may be on an outing, perhaps going for a sail on a Mobile Bay boat, as they seem to be posing on a dock in front of a boat. Ina Mae seems rather formally dressed. Clifford either played the ukulele or else hammed it up for the camera with the four-string guitar that belonged to someone else.

Does anyone have more info on Clifford and his family?

Here Is Why You Carefully Record Photo Information

Here is a good reason to carefully record all the information you can about a photo.

This woman who posed with her small patch of flowers for this photo was identified only as Aunt Howell, an aunt of N.B. "Bonie" Pierce (1880-1964).

Here are some things you can record that may prove helpful in your family history research:

Date you record the following information

Photograph owner’s name

Address

Telephone number

About the photo print

• Condition
• Type of image
• Size (Height x Width)
• Type of mount or paper and thickness
• Original or copy print
• Date of copy print
• Whereabouts of negative

About the photographer

• Photographer’s name
• Photographer’s imprint
• Dates of operation

About the content of the photo

• Names and birthdates of the people in the photo
• Location the photograph was taken
• Props or background
• Costume description
• Costume time frame

Other information you may have

Do you appear in photos in which you can no longer identify yourself accurately?

Do you appear in some childhood group photos in which you can no longer identify yourself accurately? This can easily happen in photos of brothers or sisters who resemble each other and are close in age.

In the case of the above photo, confusion of seems to have occurred because the two girls on the right have similar hair styles, even though they are of different ages and heights. And they are not in same family.

The children of N.B. "Bonie" Pierce and Julia L. Moody often played with the children of their neighbor, the Brannan family.

Beatrice Pierce Poore (1921-1993) identified the children, from left, as: Mallory Brannan, Calvin Brannan, Raymond Pierce (1923-1981), an unidentifed Brannan child being held by Beatrice Pierce and Laverne Brannan.

But Mallory Brannan identified the girl holding the child as Laverne, the child as May Brannan and the last girl as Beatrice.

One clue as to whether Beatrice or Mallory was correct in their identifications comes from the fact that the

Beatrice Pierce school photo

girl on the right is wearing glasses. Beatrice suffered from poor vision and wore glasses with thick lenses. Another photo of Bea wearing glasses appears to confirm Mallory's identification of the children.

The photo also gives a glimpse of what the backyard and back of the Pierce home looked like. I think this is the Pierce home, but I'm not totally sure. Since the Pierce family took lots of photos and this one was in the family photos, it seems reasonable to believe this is the Pierce home.

Does anyone recognize the equipment in the background? The tower appears to be a water tank.