100 Years - An Insider's View

For anyone who watches HGTV's "Fixer Upper", your eye might dart past the caskets to the back right corner while you squeal, "Shiplap!!!"  For the rest who don't watch the show, you are definitely missing out. Ok, initial excitement and longing for that shiplap to use in my current house aside, this is the basement of the "old, old" funeral home.

My sisters were all too young to remember anything about the building, so I am putting all my interior photographs together so that we can "walk" into the building where our family's business began.

This photograph was taken in the central hallway.  Both the piano (which lives with me) and the organ (which lives at the current funeral home, as far as I know) were in the hallway. You can just see a little of the chapel through the doorway. Had to smile when I noticed the stacks of music on the floor. Genetic. I'm telling you, our tendency to stack stuff is genetic!

Grandmother and her sister, Johnnie, caught in a moment of silliness in the kitchen of the funeral home. To give you perspective, I think Johnnie married a McCollum and was BarbaraNell's mother.  According to Mama, Johnnie was also the original owner of  "the piano". 

I don't remember being upstairs often, so I'm assuming this is the downstairs living room.  I remember french doors opening onto the central hallway and I remember the hardwood floors.

The stairway to the upstairs was in the central hall, and it seemed to me to stretch upward forever. The upstairs had bedrooms opening off a central living area. Little Beth is in the upstairs living area with the stairway's railing in the background.

I don't remember the bedrooms at all, but have been told that Mama's bedroom was "huge".   This picture was taken in her bedroom - not certain of the exact year. (I do like that headboard!)  I will ask our cousins and Aunt Katherine questions about the interior.  I'm noticing wallpaper in some of these photos.  The downstairs wasn't wallpapered to my recollection. 

Each and every little piece of information goes together to create an image of what life was like at any given point in time. Unfortunately, nearly all of the family's photographs were destroyed in the fire that destroyed the first building. All of these were scanned from collections belonging to Aunt Nancy, Aunt Tootsie, and a few from Mama.

The last photograph is a familiar one. This is Granddaddy, Mama, and Aunt Nancy. This photograph is how I determined that the Shiplap photo was taken in the first building. Mama's age is what places it at about 1939.  

Our family's photographs, especially snapshots, give us a glimpse into our past. We see what they saw. It is personal. It is ours alone. It is family. We can see into our past, and that vision is with insider's view.