This is the family of William Perkins Wright (our great-grandfather). Adults (L to R): Sarah Vannoy May, Angeline Hawkins Wright, William Perkins Wright, Mary Hawkins. Children of William and Angeline (L to R): Charlotte Mary (in front of her mother), John Edwin (our grandfather), William James, Richard Hawkins (on the ground), Clay Lloyd.

Sarah May was the grandmother of Angeline and Mary Hawkins. She raised the girls after their mother (her daughter Mary Elizabeth) passed away in 1857 when Angeline was 8½ and Mary was almost 4. Their father James Hawkins remarried after their mother’s death and his new wife apparently did not want the girls.

Angeline and Mary had two sisters between them in age. Ida died as an infant. Ione died about age 8, about two years after her mother’s death. (I don’t know whether this was before or after her father remarried.)

Sarah May herself evidently had an interesting life. According to family lore, she survived an Indian attack in Indiana as a child, in which her parents were killed. She was taken in by a family named Vannoy but the name of her birth family is unknown.

Mary Hawkins never married. She was known as “Auntie Hawkins” to her grandnieces and grandnephews. In her later years, she lived in Seattle with her nephew Richard (the infant in this photo) and his wife Edith. Mary was still living in Seattle in 1926 when grandnephews Irvine and Lloyd Wright visited her there.

According to family lore, Clay Lloyd, facing discipline when his father got home from work, ran away at about age 10 (perhaps four years after this photo was taken) and was never heard from again.

When you start counting it up, there is an extraordinary amount of tragedy represented in this photo.

If all goes well, tomorrow’s PotD will take us forward to about 1915, to see some of these same people about 35 years later.