Another Thousand Words

This is a scan of a reproduction of an image from (probably) the summer of 1929 in Texas. The girl is my mother. The old woman is my mother's grandmother (they called her Gran), her father's mother - so she's my mother's father's mother, my great-grandmother, born Lucy Vencill.

Lucy Vencill was born in Virginia before the War Between the States, in the mid-1850s. There are conflicting stories about whether they were hillbillies or more prosperous. I favor the hillbilly theory, since too many people try to dandy up their ancestors. Anyway, her father, then in his 40s, went off to war to fight for the Confederacy and died of some disease, as so many did. Some of her brothers fought too. After the war, what was left of the family moved to Kentucky. Family lore has it that carpetbaggers got their land in Virginia.

She and her husband, my great-grandfather, moved to Texas at some point, where my grandfather was born -- in 1893, when Gran would have been nearly 40. His daughter, my mother, was born in 1925, and so four years old at the time of the picture, same age as my youngest daughter now.

Gran died in 1932. My mother was seven then, so she remembers her. She told me that, among other things, Gran always had a Bible with her, and read it every day. Hillbillies, maybe, but not illiterate ones. And clearly someone who took that old-time religion seriously. It wasn't "old-time" to her, it was just religion.