The “Saturday Night Fun” assignment from Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings (along with some of the fine results) can be found here.  It involved picking out a photograph to use in this challenge for August 16 by the Family Curator.  For the original challenge you hold up an old photograph and match it up to the present day scene.  This means you have to be in the area.  Unfortunately, I live far from the sites of my past and that of my ancestors so I was am not able to do this exactly.  I also was not able to just choose my photo and let it go at that. Here is what I did.

In 2004 I spent a day driving around Detroit taking photographs of places where I used to live and of other houses family members lived in.  The angle of this house fit almost perfectly with the photograph taken in 1953 of my father with my little sister Pearl and me.  We are in front of the parsonage on Atkinson. My father was the minister of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, two blocks up the street on the corner of 12th Street and Atkinson.

My sister and I shared the bedroom on the upper left.  We used to look out of the side window into the attic of Carol and Deborah. They were our age and lived next door and got to stay up much later then we did. They had a wonderful playroom in the attic.  I taught Pearl to read by the streetlight shinning into our bedroom.  I don’t know why we waited until we were supposed to be in the bed to teach and learn reading.

On our other side lived Eleanor Gross with her family. Eleanor was a teenager and babysat with us during the rare times our parents went out.  My paternal grandparents lived down the street and I have a 2004 photograph of that house which I think I will mix with one from the 1950’s.  I was trying to think of someone still in Detroit that I could get to take a photo from the proper angle of St. Mark’s. I like this assignment!