Camera Genealogica (Part 1)
Faye Coble lived for 103 years. A happy accident that she was born in 1898 — that meant that she technically lived in three centuries. She was the first daughter born to Gertrude Coble (née Harper) on a farm not far outside Kansas City, Missouri. Unfortunately, Faye was quite young when her father died in a Kansas City hotel from gas asphyxiation. (Ironically, the hotel would be one of the first in Kansas City to get electric lighting — too late though for Robert Coble.)
Gertrude would marry again (a Calhoun) and it is from that second marriage that my own grandfather would be born. Faye was my grandfather’s half-sister.
Faye too would eventually marry. As I said at the start Faye lived a very long time but she would never have children. And so when Faye died in 2001 somehow all of her photos and photo albums ended up ultimately in a suitcase that followed one of my grandfather’s daughters from the midwest to a trailer in Eloy, Arizona. And there the photos sat under a spare bed until I showed up one day in 2015 to visit her, my Aunt Mary.
I’m very much into genealogy. I think though after this suitcase was graciously passed along to me I came to realize that my interest was more specifically as a kind of “photograph genealogist”. I found that I was little interested in taking the family tree back to when we came across the Atlantic to settle in North America. I saw very quickly that the lives of my ancestors, as captured in the photos, was what appealed to me. I think it goes without saying that a face, a pose in a photograph speaks more loudly about that person and their life than a scribble in a church record about a Baptism performed in 1783 (for example). And I think I wanted to know who they were (to the degree anyone can of course).
