Florence (Jones) Kelsey 1979

Here is a photograph of Grandma Gladys Potter at age 19 in 1907…roughly contemporary witn Helen (Jones) Kelsey’s letter, which follows:

My mother, Mary (Potter) Lavery, exchanged many letters in the 1970’s and 1980’s with distant cousins in hope of harvesting some genealogical details. Most of these cousins were quite elderly at the time, and the letters are more than a little drifty. I don’t intend to scan them in detail.

The memory reported in this snippet was written in 1979 by Helen Lucille (Jones) Kelsey (1904-1997), who was Grandma Gladys (Henry) Potter’s first cousin, once removed. I love the image she shared here of Grandma Potter singing to her cousins late at night (in 1905 +/-), running through all of the songs she had heard at the theater earlier in the evening.

The partial tree, shown below, gives a picture of how the various people mentioned above are related.

Her “mother’s and father’s bed” would have belonged to Orly Jones and Laura (Apps) Jones, who got married in 1904 and lived in Corry, Pennsylvania. Laura was the daughter of Grandma’s “Aunt Vine”, Eunice Lovinia Lore.

In this four-generation portrait ca. 1923, “Aunt Vine” is at the left, Laura Jones is at the right. The young woman at the center is Helen, the author of the letter, and the baby is her daughter Lillian (1923-2009). Helen recalled the day the portait was taken in the extract below, “Aunt Vine” had remarried an Eli Bender in 1905 who had children from a previous marriage, so “Vine” is called Grandma Bender here and a step-grandson gets a mention for being difficult.