Sentimental Sunday: Happy Mothers' Day!

A number of the blogs I follow posted about this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun created by Randy Seaver, the first part of which is:

List your matrilineal line - your mother, her mother, etc. back to the first identifiable mother.

I didn't have time to do this last night, since I worked until 10 PM and had to be at work at noon today (with 45 minutes of commuting each way), but I thought it would be a perfect Mother's Day post! Here is my maternal line:

1 - Me.
2 - My mom, Geraldine Margaret GUOKAS, married to Frederick Henry PAPE.
3 - My grandmother, aka Nani, Sara Melzina WOLFE (18 March 1908 - 16 November 1997), married to Charles Peter GUOKAS Jr. and later to Wallace Archibald.
4 - My great-grandmother, Addilee Tennessee SHELTON (4 March 1890 - 22 August 1977), married to Louis Henry WOLFE and later to Charles B. Harris.
5 - Sarah Ann (or Sarianne) SPIKES (28 September 1871 - 10 April 1935), married to Levi Marion SHELTON.
6 - Lucy Leah PICKERING (or PICKENS) (27 May 1835 - 8 June 1903), married to George Washington Barton and later to Levi Lewis SPIKES.

Lucy Leah is one of our brick walls - I don't know anything about her parents, so my matrilineal line stops there. I'm the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of an oldest daughter (well, sorta; her older sister died at birth) of an oldest daughter (again, sorta; for her mother she was).

The photo above of numbers 1 through 4 was taken in early 1958 in Houston, Texas, sometime between January (when my parents moved from Evanston, Illinois, to Houston) and March 17 (when my sister was born). My mom is on the left, pregnant with my sister. My great-grandmother is holding me (I'm somewhere between 9 and 11 months old), and Nani, my grandmother, is on the right.

The photo below has numbers 3 though 5 and was taken sometime before 1935, probably in Louisiana.  My grandmother Sara is on the far right, her mother Addilee is the dark haired woman to her right, and her grandmother (my great-great grandmother) Sarah Spikes Shelton is the woman in the middle.

© Amanda Pape - 2010