Category Archives: Grahams

Questions I Wish I’d Asked

Carnival of Genealogy, Grahams, ,
Thanksgiving with Mershell and Fannie Graham - 1963.
In these photograph: Me, Aunt Abbie, Mershell C. Graham, My grandfather carving the turkey, I am eating and my sister is next to me on the other side of the table is my mother, my grandmother Fannie, her younger sister, Alice. My uncle Henry took the photographs.  Click to enlarge this photo.

The generations gathered around my Graham grandparents dining room table in 1963 for Thanksgiving dinner. There was turkey with cornbread dressing cooked by my grandfather. There was white rice, cranberry jelly, green beans, corn pudding and sweet potatoes. There was my grandmother’s finely chopped green salad and her homemade biscuits with butter and with a relish plate holding olives, sweet pickles and carrot sticks.

One thing there wasn’t, was talk about the old days. My grandparents were born in 1888.  My grandmother was born Fannie Turner in Lowndes County, Alabama. My grandfather was born Mershell Graham in Elmore County, Alabama.  They met and married in Montgomery.  My great great Aunt Abbie was born in 1877 in Montgomery, Alabama and was the second to youngest child of Dock and Eliza Allen. My mother told us stories she had heard from her mother, mainly about Dock and Eliza and their children. I remember once my older cousin was trimming Aunt Abbie’s toenails when Aunt Abbie mentioned that she used to trim her grandmother’s toenails when she was a girl. And that her grandmother also had arthritis.  I have always remembered that, but I didn’t ask any follow up questions about her grandmother, Annie Williams who was born a slave and was full grown and the mother of a fully grown woman when she was freed. And Aunt Abbie didn’t say anything else about it.

My grandfather, who we called Poppy, was a mystery. My mother only had little parts of stories she had gotten from her mother, things that just made the mystery deeper in most cases.  What were his siblings names and what happened to them? Are the ones I’ve found that I think are his siblings, really his siblings? In 1900, I found these possible siblings living with a man who is listed as their father but has a name not listed on any of their death certificates, was he their father with a different name?  And where was he, my grandfather, in 1900? Why wasn’t he there, or anywhere else I can find? Where was their mother?  What was the name of the little white girl he was servant of when he was a boy?  The one he slept on the floor outside of her bedroom door?  The one who changed his name from Michele to Mershell because Michele sounded too “foreign”? How did he learn to read?  Did he go to school? Did he know his grandparents and what plantation did his parents come off of? There was a photograph of his sister and her children in the album.  I would like to ask him what their names were.  Are they the ones I’ve found in the census?

I would like to ask my grandmother some of the same questions about her father’s family. Howard Turner died when she was 4 and her mother moved away from that community and went back to her family in Montgomery. I was able to find her father’s family because I knew his name, his age and the community he came from but I have no stories about his parents and siblings or what plantation they came off of. I only know that his father, Joseph Turner of Hayneville, Lowndes County was a farmer and owned his own land and had given his son some land which he didn’t want him to sell and the two of them argued about it.

When we went by my other grandparent’s house for desert I would ask where my grandfather’s mother, Celia Rice Cleage Sherman is buried. And why my grandmother Pearl thought her grandmother was Cherokee.

Unfortunately, I can’t go back to 1963 and sit around the table and steer the conversation around to who was where and when and  how and why.  I can only use the information I do have to keep looking and hope that one day some cousins from those mysterious lines will turn up and perhaps have some of the answers to my questions.

_______________

To read more stories about oral history from the Carnival, CLICK the icon.

This was written for the Blog Carnival “The Ancestors Told; the Elders Listened; We Pass It On”.

Doris Graham, High School Senior – 1940

Grahams, Photographs, sepia saturday
Eastern High School

In 1940 my mother, Doris Graham, was a senior at Eastern High School in Detroit.  At that time it stood on East Grand Blvd and Mack Ave, a mile from her home at 6638 Theodore.  Eastern was torn down in the late 1960s.  She was copy editor of the school newspaper “The Indian”, a member of the school Honor Society “The Chiefs” and regularly achieved all “A” report cards, “A” being the highest grade. My mother was in a variety of school activities , but the only photo of her in the Year book is the one below.  She is on the lower right, writing.

My mother graduated in January  of 1940 and entered Wayne University the next month.  I wrote about the cost of attending Wayne in 1940 here.  You can read an article my mother wrote for the school paper and see a report card here.  You will notice I used the above photo in that post. It fit so well with this week’s prompt that I had to feature.  You can read about my mother and her family in the 1940 census here.

My mother is the one on the far right. It says about her “Doris Graham – Victory; memorial committee, house secretary, homeroom secretary, hall guard, Mixed Chorus, Indian Staff, Chiefs; Intelligence high; she’ll succeed by and by.”  “Victory House” was her homeroom.
To read more Sepia Saturday posts CLICK!

My Cousin Was a Telephone Operator

Grahams, Photographs, sepia saturday,
Marilyn in the wagon at Nanny’s and Poppy’s. Detroit Michigan, 1955.

This week the Sepia Saturday theme is telephones or telephone operators. I would like to write about my cousin Marilyn’s amazing career as a telephone operator for Bell Telephone Company in Detroit.  She started working in 1981 and continued until her retirement in 2008.

My cousin Marilyn at work.
My cousin Marilyn at work.  Photo taken in 1989.

My cousin sent me a photograph of herself at work with the phone company. She wrote a bit about her years at there:

At Michigan Bell Telephone Co, which turned into AT&T Inc. Worked from 1981 to 2008 (about 28 years)

  • Information operator (“What city?”)
  • Also worked as a clerk in the company and
  • A telephone booth $ collector (Drove a big truck with a hard had, lots of keys hanging on side – 2 way radio “walkie talkie.”

Unfortunately I do not have any photographs of Marilyn at the switchboard so I am inserting a photo grab from one of my favorite movie, Danzón (María Novaro, 1991). The whole movie (Spanish, no subtitles) is available on YouTube in more than 10 parts. I would advise renting the movie. It has everything, dancing, true love, a fine young man on a boat, good hearted prostitutes, female impersonators, friendship, motherhood, aging. I found it on Netflix here and also cheap on Amazon.

Telephone Operators in the movie Danzón (María Novaro, 1991). María Rojo, Carmen Salinas, Tito Vasconcelos.
For more posts featuring telephone operators and more, click.

Newspaper Clipping of My Parents in San Francisco – 1944

Cleages, Grahams, Photographs

My parents were married November  17 1943, at Plymouth Congregational Church in Detroit. They left immediately for Lexington Kentucky, where my father was pastor of Chandler Memorial Church until he accepted the position above as co-pastor of the interracial Fellowship Church in San Francisco.  I had never seen this photograph before my cousin scanned it for me yesterday. There is no newspaper name or date on the clipping.  Perhaps it appeared in The Sun, a black newspaper, founded in San Fransisco in 1944.

A photograph of Fellowship Church in San Francisco from my father’s album.

A Dance, a Box and half of Henry

Cleages, Grahams, Photographs, sepia saturday, ,
Click for headless photos and more.

The prompt for this weeks Sepia Saturday is a photograph of a boy in front of a theater next a sign advertising a movie about an ex-convict. Standing on the far right side is a man with his head cut off by the photographer. I looked through my photos and was disappointed to find no sepia headless ones. I thought I had seen some in a box of photographs that came from my uncle Henry Cleage.

I came across this photograph in the box. Most of the photographs are of Henry’s first wife, Alice Stanton. She is the one in the front holding the purse. I noticed Doris Graham, my mother and Henry’s second wife, dancing in the background.  I do not know who either of the men are.  The photo was taken in 1939 or 1940 in Detroit.  Henry and Alice were married on 3 September, 1941 in Detroit and divorced not too many years later. At first I thought that this photograph was taken the same day as the one below, but when I compared them, the news photo was of a much posher affair.

“Oh, Mr. Photographer! That’s what pretty Doris Graham (left) probably said as she glided by in the arms of Robert Douglass … Chesterfield club…”    The incomplete caption at the bottom of this photo from my grandmother Fannie Graham’s scrapbook. Doris Graham, my mother.  The newspaper was the Detroit Tribune which was published by my grandmother’s cousin, Edward McCall. The date was added by my grandmother.

 For some reason, at this point, I noticed the address on the box that the photographs were kept in. It was addressed to Dr. L. J. Cleage at Homer Phillips Hospital in St.Louis.

The box.

Had my Uncle Louis done his medical internship at Homer Phillips Hospital? If so, it was probably around 1940.  Although both Louis and my father were enumerated with their parents on Scotten Ave. in Detroit, both were listed as absent from the home. You can see them here in the 1940 Census.  I went to Ancestry.com and looked for records for Louis Jacob Cleage. In the 1940 census he was indexed with his parents but there was also a Dr. Louis Cleage in St. Louis, MO. There he was, living in the doctor’s housing at Homer G. Phillips, as a Jr. intern.

Homer G. Phillips Hospital and surrounding area 1940.

The story of Homer G. Phillips hospital is a familiar one – black citizens tired of second class health care, black doctors tired of not being able to hospitalize and care for their own patients, of being unable to practice in the hospitals in their city. Click this link to read more about Homer G. Phillips Hospital’s interesting history.  My husband’s younger siblings were born in St. Louis. He thought some of them might have been born at Homer G. Phillips. As luck would have it, his sister called  right about then and confirmed that she and all of the youngest five Williams’ were born there from 1950 to 1963.

I seemed to be on a roll, so I decided to see if my father was enumerated in 1940 as a student at Oberlin where he attended Seminary. He did not turn up anywhere else outside of his parents home in the 1940 census. However, he was listed in the 1940 Oberlin Student Directory.  His birth date is off by 9 years, but the home address is his parent’s Scotten Ave. address in Detroit.

After all this it was an anti-climax to find one photo with half a head missing – Henry holding up some fish while standing by Lake Idlewild.  Since the focus is on the fish, perhaps this doesn’t really count. My family photographers seemed to have been more likely to leave lots of space with everybody crowded to the center than they were to chop off a head. Or maybe they just tossed all of those headless photographs.

Henry with his catch. 1940 Lake Idlewild.

Three Hats

Grahams, sepia saturday

These are friends of my grandfather, MC Graham (Poppy). I used this photograph before but never as the featured photo. I thought the bowler hat theme was perfect for this.  I don’t know who they are. The photograph was probably taken between 1917 in Montgomery before my grandfather married or 1919 in Detroit. Unfortunately it’s undated and unidentified. I am going by the clothes my grandfather wore that day and in other photos that are dated.

My grandfather and unidentified friend.

This photo is un-photoshopped. I couldn’t get the woman’s face right so I just included it as is. You can see more of the coat in this one. We are left to guess at the dress underneath.

For more Sepia Saturday Offerings, click.

Marilyn Makes a Trunk – 1956

Grahams, sepia saturday

When I was growing up my sister, my cousins and I always made a yearly trip to the Detroit zoo with our mothers and grandfather, Poppy.  My youngest cousin Marilyn was impressed by the elephants trunk this year and went around making her arm into a trunk afterwards.

For more Sepia Saturday posts, click!