Mary Jane Long McLaughin (1828-1920)

Aunt Mary circa 1908

From the early 1900s: My 2nd great grand aunt Mary Jane Long McLaughlin. My mother's great-grandfather's sister, Aunt Mary was born in Illinois in 1828. She moved to Troy, Kansas, where in 1847 she married Harkness D. McLaughlin and raised six children. Sometime between 1900 and 1910, long after Harkness had died in 1874, she moved to Los Angeles to be near family. She died at the ripe old age of 92 in 1920. I'm not sure if I'm looking at the past or at my future in this pic. Long live the Aunt Marys of this world!

Aunt Mary with Bud Crozier? circa 1920

Roadside Picnic with the Griers

From around 1910: My Aunt Alma and Uncle Ed on the right taking a break from a little road trip. I'm not sure who the people are on the left, but it looks as if the first man might have been a chauffeur (Alma and Ed were my only relatives with means); the first woman on the left is my Great-Aunt Georgia, Alma's sister; the woman next to her is someone named Ethel; and the little girl who looks as if she was photoshopped in from the 1950s is my cousin Dot, Alma and Ed's daughter.

Captain William A. Long (1828-1862)

Still thinking of soldiers who gave their lives: This picture was taken around 1860. On the left is my 2nd great-grandfather William Alfred Long. On the right is his brother James Hiram Long. William was a Captain in the Union Army during the Civil War. The Longs lived in Missouri at the time, a state much divided in loyalties. Seriously wounded in the Battle of Lone Jack in August of 1862, William was discovered among the dead and dying by a neighbor fighting on the Confederate side. The neighbor, James Henley, got a wagon and took the wounded Captain home, where the Henley family nursed William until he died. I had heard this story for years, but I suspected that my mom might have embellished it a bit. Turns out to be true. Even war can't completely extinguish the compassion found in the human heart.

Chaplain Graydon E. McClellan Heading Home

From left: My father, Marian and Jimmy McPartland?

From April 1946: After two years as an Army chaplain, most of it spent in the European Theater, my father sailed out of LeHavre on a troop ship headed for New York. On that ship, Dad met jazz musicians Jimmy and Marian McPartland. Jimmy served in the Army, playing jazz for the soldiers. That's how Jimmy met Marian, who had joined an English version of the USO. My father was never a jazz fan, but he really enjoyed these two, and he and Marian stayed in touch over the years. That's my dad on the left in the first picture. I THINK—but don't know for sure—that the couple in the photos is Marian and Jimmy; based on the last photo, which is a picture of them that I found on the Internet, I'm pretty sure that they're the very same people. And people wonder why I spend so much time looking through all these old photos! 

Definitely Marian and Jimmy McPartland

Marian and Jimmy McPartland?

Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long (1832-1897)

Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long circa 1860

The Long Family, circa 1865 (clockwise from bottom left):
Margaret Matilda, Julia C, Margaret Lucy, John G, Willie

By all accounts, Margaret Matilda Armstrong Long, my great-great-grandmother, was a mighty woman. Widowed in 1862, when her husband, William Alfred Long, was killed at the Battle of Lone Jack in Missouri, Margaret Matilda was left with four young children to raise on her own. When the children were older, she moved the family to Laramie, Wyoming, where she was active in the Temperance Movement and the local Baptist church. Eventually she moved to Silver Plume, Colorado, to live with her daughter Julia, finally ending up in Los Angeles with her daughter Margaret Lucy. Another example of the pull of the west in my family tree.