Mom’s caption on the page of her photo album displaying the three photos below is “Daddy & Mama with cousins.” Yes, but what cousins, on which side of the family, from where? It doesn’t say. (Maybe she didn’t ever know, or at least didn’t remember years later when she wrote the caption.) My interpretation is that these were not cousins with whom they had regular contact. (There were some first cousins with whom Grandpa and Grandma had very regular contact, most notably Deo McClain, who was just a little younger than they were, and lived in Albany. But also there were the children of Grandpa’s Uncle Bill in Lebanon.)

But to the photos… First, here is a woman and man with Grandma and Grandpa McClain (Grandma and Grandpa on the ends with the couple between them). I assume one of the couple is a first cousin to either Grandma or Grandpa, just based on Mom’s caption (although Mom doesn’t explicitly say “first cousins”).

The next two photos apparently go with the above photo, and (I assume) show children of the couple. Resemblance of the children to the couple seems to bear that out.

I am making the assumption that these photos were taken on the Tallman farm. But there is nothing I can see in the photos that proves that (unless it’s the photo of the tractor). I suppose it is possible these photos were taken on a trip to visit cousins out of the area.

If you can identify the mystery cousins, please speak up!

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OK, that’s the TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read”) summary. If you have the time, the interest and the courage, read on and I’ll elaborate on Grandpa and Grandma’s first cousins in general. (I’m going to switch to names at this point because writing the titles is just too cumbersome and confusing. I mean no disrespect.)

First cousins, of course, are children of one’s parents’ siblings. So let’s go down the list for Arthur and Addie…

Arthur’s father Nathan was the second of six, although his next younger sister (named Mary Elizabeth McClain, just to make things confusing) did not survive to adulthood. Here is a list of his other siblings, the number of children they had who were within ten years of Arthur’s age and the total number of their children:

aunt/uncle	±10yrs	total	comments
Sarah McClain Drage	0	1	passed away after first child; child was much older than Arthur
Catherine McClain Funk	6	8	some children in Seattle area
Ed McClain	5	6	ended up in Albany; some children in Oregon
Bill McClain	2	4	came west with Nathan; lived in Lebanon

So there were a total of 13 first cousins about Arthur’s age on his father’s side.

Arthur’s mother Mary was the sixth of twelve children, of which two did not live to adulthood, two others did not marry, and one died of disease at the Battle of Vicksburg, as a soldier from Illinois (Civil War). Of the rest who had children, here is a count of children who were within ten years of Arthur’s age, and total number of children they had:

aunt/uncle	±10yrs	total	comments
Noah McClain	3	7
Sarah McClain Hull	8	10
Elmina McClain Lierley	2	4	ended up in Seattle area
James McClain	6	6
John McClain	6	7	ended up in Salem; sons Leonard and Deo in Albany
Ellen McClain Rathbun	5	7

So there were a total of 30 first cousins about Arthur’s age on his mother’s side.

Aunt Betty mentioned at one point that she remembered visiting both the Lierleys and the Funks in Washington. So there was some contact with those cousins.

Pretty much all of Addie’s extended family was in Ohio. Aunt Betty mentioned once that the only member of the extended Hammell family she ever met was Mary Elizabeth Semler, John Hammell’s sister, who came from Ohio for a visit when Aunt Betty was about 10. I considered the possibility that the above photos were from that visit, but to my knowledge Mary married later in life and had no children. Also Aunt Betty had the impression that Mary was a widow, so she probably came on that visit by herself. (Mary was not a widow, though. Her husband actually outlived her.)

Although they were far away, Addie did have first cousins. Her father, John, was the oldest of three, but the cousin situation is so simple that I won’t even bother with a table. As mentioned, his sister had no children (as far as I know). His younger brother Logan (14 years his junior) had three daughters, but they were the ages of John’s grandchildren (that is, about Florence’s age), so nowhere near Addie’s age.

Addie had a number of cousins on her mother’s (Sarah’s) side (the Rine family). Sarah was the oldest of ten and the age range was such that Sarah’s youngest brother was born the year she was married. Because of this. a lot of those cousins were considerably younger than Addie. According to the information I have (which I don’t necessarily trust to be complete), four of Sarah’s siblings had children, but only one of all those children was within ten years of Addie’s age: Martha Claypool, the daugher of Mary Rhine Claypool. And she was eight years younger than Addie. All the rest of the cousins were younger than that—more like Florence’s age.

Given the wide age ranges of the generations in the Rine family, it would theoretically be possible that Arthur and Addie’s first cousins in the above photos were the children rather than their parents. One of Addie’s uncles, Samuel Rine, was less than ten years older than she was. But the configuration of Samuel’s children doesn’t really line up with the four boys we see in these photos. There was an aunt and another uncle younger than Samuel. The uncle, Willis, died at age 2, and I have no information on the aunt, Eliza.

Based on what is known of the Rine and Hammell families, then, it seems unlikely that the cousins in these photos came from that side. In contrast, on the McClain side Arthur had a total of 43 first cousins who were within ten years of his age. The information I have on those cousins is not complete enough that I could try to find a particular one who had four sons with ages approximating the ones in these photos. But the likelihood on numbers alone is that these cousins were from the McClain family.

All this is based on the assumption that “cousin” means “first cousin.” If the cousins in this case were more distant than that, the possibilities become very nearly endless.

Either way, though, unless someone can come up with an identification for these people, we’ll have to consign them to the “mystery” file.