Another Minor Mystery (The Wright Side)
Last year, I posted about a minor mystery involving my Minor family. Well, you may recall that a few months ago, I went to the home of Opal Smith, an elderly relative, and scanned a bunch of old photographs. Among them were a couple of photographs of my great-great-grandmother, Gorda Wright Minor, looking very young, standing at the graves of her husband and her parents in the cemetery we call Friendship-on-the-Mountain (to distinguish it from the other Friendship). And standing with her was a very elderly man. I mentioned to my mother offhand, "I wonder if that could be her father." Gorda's father, Andrew Jackson "Jack" Wright, lived to be a very old man of 96, and she only outlived him by a decade (she was killed in the great tornado outbreak of 1932).
Immediately I rather regretted saying this, because my mom latched onto this idea and before I knew it was telling everyone that "we think this might be a picture of our ancestor Jack Wright." If I was within earshot, I would pipe up, "Now we don't have any hard evidence of that. It could be him. But it could also be an older brother. Gorda did have an older brother who was twenty years older than her. I'm not sure this man looks to be in his nineties." And she would point out that "he's carrying two walking sticks!" And he is.
Gorda is the small lady. We don't know any of the others in the photograph, but there is a family resemblance. The old man on the right is the Wright in question. Here they are standing at the graves of James M. Minor, Gorda's husband, who died in 1915, and her son Olen, who died of measles in 1918 while a soldier encamped in New York, preparing to go to war in Europe.
Here they are standing at the headstone that's today over the graves of Andrew Jackson Wright and his wife Mary Jane Duncan (who died in 1914). But is he buried there? Or just his wife? Could this be Jack Wright in the photograph, standing at his own grave? I made a great effort to read the inscription on the stone, but the photograph was too washed out to read anything meaningful from it.
Or was it? I am not a Photoshop wizard, but after a lot of tweaking the curves, I managed to get this out (if you think you can do a better job, I would be obliged):
On the right side of the marker, already knowing what it said, I was able to make out the name and dates of M. J. Wright (I have the dates in my genealogy database). But on the left side, I could make out nothing. Was A. J. Wright dead or alive?
I decided the best course of action would be to date the photograph by other means. The clothing styles appeared 1920s. Gorda looks much younger than she does in photographs from the 1930s. Clearly, the photograph was made after Olen Minor's death in 1918. But was it made before Jack Wright's death in 1922? In the photographs there are no graves nearby to those of my family. Notably, there is nothing behind them. I knew that in the cemetery today, there's quite a bit of cemetery back there. When were those graves placed? I needed to visit the cemetery to see.
Last Sunday was Decoration out at the other Friendship. (It was a good day; see my Flickr for some photos I took.) Friendship-on-the-Mountain is only a few more miles down the road (on top of the mountain), so I asked that we go up there. I was thrilled and elated at what I found. There were no graves behind either the Minor graves or the Wright graves that dated before 1922. I had successfully dated the old photographs to circa 1920!
Circa 1920:
2008:
The second grave from the left, the one not in the old photograph, is Gorda's. Something large also missing from the old photograph is the church building! I didn't think to check the cornerstone, but it appears to have been built in the 1940s. The first grave from the left, also absent from the old photograph, is dated 1921.
Circa 1920:
2008:
That's my mom.
Another view:
Again, everything near and behind the headstone dates from after 1920, some of the graves from between 1920 and 1922. It supports a date for the old photographs of circa 1920.
But then, it all came crashing down. I took a closer look at the Wright stone. Something was wrong.
Mary Jane Wright is buried on the wrong side of the stone!
In the old photograph, her name and dates are on the right side of the stone. Today, her name and dates are on the left side of the stone. This made no sense. What could it mean? I was deeply befuddled.
But after some time spent beating my head against the problem, several items began to fall out. First, in both the old photograph and the present-day cemetery, there is a footstone for Mary Jane Wright on the left side of the marker. In the present-day cemetery, the footstone on the right side of the marker, the grave marked as A. J. Wright's, is several feet to the right. This can't be the footstone visible on the left side of the stone in the picture. A.J's should have been visible in the picture if he were dead, and it's not there.
Clearly, Mary Jane Wright was dead. Olen Minor died in 1918 and he was dead, so Mary Jane must have been also. The foostone visible in the photograph must be hers. But why is her name and date on the right side of the stone? It doesn't make sense that they would have moved the grave, so clearly it must have been the marker that was in error. The stonemaker made a mistake, and put her name on the wrong side of the Wright stone.
But if this is 1920, she'd been dead about six years. Why was the marker not corrected? Certainly at some point it was corrected; today, it correctly shows her on the left side and her husband on the right. When was the stone corrected? After her husband died, no doubt. Probably at the very time they brought the stone in to put his death date on it.
The conclusion: The photographs date to circa 1920. The error in the stone all but proves it: Andrew Jackson Wright wasn't dead! Consider the fact that this is a very old man in the photograph, and that Jack Wright would've been a very old man, and that he lived just a few miles from Gorda Minor, and I'm convinced. I'm looking at a photograph of my great-great-great-grandfather.
I am learning to trust my mother's intuition. She doesn't jump to conclusions lightly, and when she does, she's usually right.