Mothers and Daughters
It’s been ten years since the passing of my sweet mother-in-law, Nancy Sowers Mutter.
Nancy was a truly kind soul. Even the rising dementia in her later years -- “Did you talk to my mother today?” (Her mother died in 1951) or “Have you seen Price today?” (He died in 2007) – could not dim her fundamentally kind nature. Her graceful slide is something I wish for as I age – the challenging genetics of three grandparents who quite literally went off the deep end (see Immigrant Secrets and The Search For My Grandparents) often preys on my mind.
Her last words a week or two before she died were “I hope you all know how much I’ve loved you.” She was on brand until the end.
Nancy was very proud of her family history. At the drop of a hat, she could rap a DAR riff on her ancestors:
I was a Sowers,
My mother was a Stull,
Her mother was a Davis,
Her mother was a Baylor,
Her mother was a Glen(n),
Her mother was an Abernathy, and her father fought in the Revolutionary War.
This first got me interested in my own family history, because at the time I first met Nancy, I could only name names up to my four immigrant grandparents, and only really knew anything about one of them. Which set in motion forces that would lead to a retirement career centered around boring strangers with my family history tales.
I recently came across this picture of Nancy and her mother Mary Elizabeth in my mostly uncategorized Google archive of tens of thousands of photos, some digital and some scanned. It was probably taken around 1930. Nancy was probably an early “tween,” although she would have had no awareness of this term in a time not nearly as focused on the young as our own. I really liked it and cleaned it up a bit.
That got me thinking about the way Nancy expressed her family history -- mothers and daughters – and the unique tie that exists between mothers and daughters. That’s not to diminish mothers and sons at all – there is something unique there as well. But I’ll leave that for another post.
I wondered whether there were a similar pic of Mary Elizabeth and her mother, Nannie Davis. I haven’t been able to find one yet of both, although I did find one of Nannie by herself.
Continuing on a family photo rampage – these are the things of which retirement days are made – I wondered whether I could find a picture of Mary Glenn at a similar age with Nancy, and ditto for Erin with Mary Glenn. It’s not as easy as you might think given some of the prohibitions that have been placed upon me in posting any pictures without advanced written approval. But I never pay attention to that.
And so here you go. Recorded for whoever in the future might be doing family history. Assuming these electrons are preserved somewhere.
I miss you, Nancy. A sweet soul for whom family was everything. You set in motion a chain of mothers and daughters whom I have had the good fortune to love.
