Lost & Found - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Lost & Found

Over Labor Day weekend, we traveled back home for a family photo and stayed with my wife’s mother in Russia. More on that in a minute. But first, since the Homecoming Festival was underway, we took the opportunity to spend an afternoon and evening there on Sunday. My brother-in-laws affectionately call it the Russia World’s Fair. Turns out my father-in-law, an uncle-in-law and two brothers-in-law have been event chairs and are included in this list of previous chairs since 1954.

We ran into many people our age we knew and many more younger people who looked somewhat familiar but were likely the children or grandchildren of those we knew way back when! Of course, the beer tent was a favorite place to meet old friends, one of which was the town Mayor, who kindly bought me a Wally Post Red beer, a favorite craft brew that I had written about in this past blog. Here's the Mayor's photo from a few year's ago. Thanks, Terry!

Here’s a collage of photos from past and present events:

The stay at my mother-in-law’s place was interesting in that during the course of our conversations, we learned that she had never seen her parent’s obituaries. So right on the spot, I used my phone to search google and found them in short order as shown below along with a photo of their gravestone My mother-in-law was so surprised my little iPhone had held what she had been looking for her entire life, as both of her parents had died when she was very young.

Here’s the 1919 wedding photo of her parents, William and Emma.

Living on the farm adjacent to my mother-in-laws parents were my grandparents, so upon their death, my grandmother, for all intents and purposes, “adopted" my mother-in-laws family of eight children, one of whom married my uncle. To this day, the family recalls fond memories of my grandmother, who incidentally had lost her husband, my grandfather, the year before Emma’s death. My grandmother was raising 14 children on her own as pictured below, so what’s the big deal with 8 more? Large families in those days were the norm - all the more to help around the farm.

Speaking of large families, here’s the photo of the 75 members of my wife’s family that was taken over the weekend.

My beautiful mother-in-law is right in the center!