52 Photos Week 5:Profession

Question

Time for the next 52 Photos challenge of 2020!

This week's theme:

PROFESSION

To participate, simply:

1. reply below, and
2. add a photo that fits the theme to this week's free-space gallery.

If you use a social network (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) please share the photo there as well, using #52photos and #wikitree. This can be a great way to involve more family members. If you use a blog, include a link to your blog post in your answer below so we can all read it.

You don't need to participate every week to share a photo. But members who do participate every week can earn challenge badges. Click here for more info. If this is your first time participating and you don't have the participation badge, or if you pass a milestone (13 in 13, 26 in 26, 52 in 52) please post here.

For help with how to add photos, see here.

Answer 1

This is a photo my maternal grandfather Cecil Showalter in his uniform.  He was a professional fire fighter for the city of Santa Rosa, California for over twenty-five years.  

Comments

Handsome man. :-)

Answer 2

Grandfather Alfred Truslow, Jr. was career US Navy and achieved the rank of Commander before he retired. 

Answer 3

My great-great-great grandfather, William Jacob Allison (1794-1854), was one of the early doctors in the Coles County, Illinois area. 

He was born in Kentucky ... got his license to practice medicine in 1832 ... he then moved to Illinois in 1833 and practiced medicine there until his death.

Although he didn't have his own church, he had a second profession ... he was also a Methodist preacher who was called upon to deliver the sermon when another clergy was not available ... which it is believed was very often.

Comments

Are you sure he died in 1854?  Photos weren't widely available until after the Civil War.

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I was told that this is actually a photo of a painting ... but not 100% sure.

Answer 4

Below is the diploma that my husband's grandfather, Dr. William Roi Nelson received on 26 Dec 1919. Optometrist was his profession. He along with four other men established the Oklahoma Optometric Association, of which he served as president. The top photo is of him and his son, who also was an optometrist.

Comments

Alexis, what a great picture of your husband's grandfather. And of course his eyeglasses are perfect. I love his son's clothes. They are so cute.

Thank you for sharing.

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Thank you Cheryl, I originally did not scan the photo because of the writing, but doing these challenges has made me appreciate these photos. Now I think that my husband’s grandmother writing on it makes the photo even better.

Answer 5

My great grandfather, William Wesley Stewart was a newsman. He owned the first printing press in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, and was the founder of the Assiniboia Times.  He's pictured here with his printing press. It's unknown who the boy in the photo is. 

Answer 6

The man sitting in the seat is [[https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Cantway-4]], and he was the Fire Chief for the Momence Fire Department in the early 1900s. He is also my niece's gg grandfather. 

Mitch was one of "the boys" that organized the original fire department in Momence and managed to get enough money together to buy the first fire engine.

Mitch Cantway said that at the call of "fire" twenty or thirty men would grab the rope (the engine came equipped with about thirty feet of rope for pulling), but often the roads were so bad that someone would have to go to the livery stable for a team and wagon to come pull the fire engine out of the mud.

Comments

Cheryl, thank you for sharing this wonderful photo. Mitch's story about having to get the team of horses to pull the fire engine out of the mud is priceless. Guess they were the wrecker service back then.

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Thank you Alexis - and I am glad we are both doing this challenge, because I know we will meet here every week. Your comment was cute and brought a smile to my face. 

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That vehicle was probably state of the art at that time. :-)

Answer 7

My great-uncle Sidney Gwinn was a newspaper pressman for most of his life, but while young he was a conductor or motorman for the interurban in Champaign-Urbana Illinois.

Comments

My grandfather was also a conductor for P&N electric interurban rail based in Anderson, South Carolina. I wish we had an impressive portrait of him like your great-uncle's.

Answer 8

My grandmother was a dental hygienist for most of her life. Here she is (on the right) as a student, learning at a dental hygiene convention. 

Answer 9

This is my first time participating in a challenge. I chose a photo of my mama, Ina-Margaret Maize (WIeland-306) working at a radio station in Honolulu, Hawaii. This is one of my favorite photos of her. She never thought of herself as attractive yet she took bare-faced photos looking like an editorial model! She was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia last year and has deteriorated rapidly. Photos like this one remind me of how vibrant, adventurous, and full of life she has always been.

Comments

You didn't post a photo ... and your mother's profile is private (because she's living), so we can't see it that way either...

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I did post a photo and your comment is pretty rudely made. :(

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I'm sorry I offended you, I can assure you there was absolutely no rudeness intended.  I was just pointing out there is no photo on your post, and we can't see it by going to your mother's profile either, for the reason I gave.

Update: I changed my original reply, from "still living" to "living", as that had unnecessary implications.

Answer 10

Here is a photo of my great-great-great grandfather, "Yeager" Clinard. He was a farmer his entire life, gaining his own land in Lawrence County in the early 1900s. The photo shows him here on his land which he used to farm, although Yeager had likely been retired for some years by this time.

Answer 11

My great-great uncle, James John Whittingham. He became a pro golf player out of Pittsburgh, PA.

Comments

What a neat photo. Golf was certainly a more formal game back then!

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Thank you! I agree. Golfing in a suit?! 

Missy 

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Golf attire has changed!  Great picture.

Answer 12

This is a photo of the family of my Great Grand Uncle by marriage, Eli Newton, they were all wheelwrights in Somerset and Devon.   This photo was taken at Brushford, Somerset in 1900

Comments

Great photo.  They're definitely posing for the picture. What's on the sign that the little boy is holding?

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Yes, definitely posed and they would still have had to hold the pose in 1900 for the photo not to blur.  I am not sure what the sign says but it could be 'I'm for crew' - there is a boat close by, but it might just be a way of saying he was one of the family. There is a horseshoe drawn on the bottom right corner of the sign.

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Re that sign, think about it for a minute. All the men there are working at something except the child - somebody has to be the boss. He's the "FOREMAN"! Magnify that section of the picture and it looks like that - the "N" has a flourish (not a horseshoe) on the first down stroke that is obscuring the "A" a bit.

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Thanks for that, I'm sure you are right, 'I'm Foreman' makes more sense. Not sure if its a flourish or a horseshoe as the horseshoe seems to have been a family symbol, note the man on the left is holding one.

Answer 13

My dad's father, Victor, spent his life teaching Dale Carnegie classes.  He loved people and was a natural in his line of work.  He would also volunteer his time on weekends teaching the classes to people who were incarcerated.

Answer 14

Seated with the accordian is my mothers cousin Robert Ehrman. He farmed during the summers, but during the winter he played the organ at Key West nightclubs.

Comments

I LOVE this photo!! 

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Thanks! It won Family History Photo of the Week for the first week of April 2014 when I first uploaded it.

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I do not know your competition (I did not join until the end of 2017), but I think this photo definitely deserved it!

Answer 15

Frank Coleman (1878-1953) on the right in this picture, is my first cousin three times removed. His entire career in South Dakota was with the railroad. At 22 he was "locomotive fireman", later he was engineer. Didn't he follow in the footsteps of his father, who had driven the stagecoach between Sioux City, Fort Randall and Fort Pierre? (See Stephen Coleman's story, published in the Sioux City Journal.)

Answer 16

This photo is from left to right, my grandfather, Harry Tracy Hoover (grocery owner), my uncle Edwin Hoover, and 4th in line is my father, Harry W. Hoover Sr. (butcher). 

Answer 17

My father, Harold Raymond Duley, (1913-1964) was a brilliant man. He worked in the White House during FDR's presidency; he was the electrical engineer on the railroad car project for Communications Car 1490. Basically, that railway car allowed FDR to travel anywhere by rail and maintain communication with anyone in the world. My dad rode in that communications car to Georgia, spent many many weekends out in back of Hyde Park (with accomodations in the Vanderbilt Mansion, no less), and all over the U.S.  

He said his job was more closely linked to the Secret Service at that time, even though he was technically on active duty in the Army.  After leaving the service, he worked at Pt. Mugu, developing umbilical detachment devices for launch, and finally owned his own TV and Radio store. The picture above is of him working on a set  - and the headline story for our tiny local paper that week! 

Answer 18

My husband's great-grandfather, David Kinsey (1841-1917) built and owned this enormous brick "factory" in Oakland Iowa.  This picture is about 1905, and the entire family is visible (if very tiny!) in the picture.

  My husband's grandmother, Inza Kinsey Shelton, recalled that she was the very blurry little girl holding her mother's hand. Her older sister Pearl is standing closest to her father David, under the barn-like structure warehousing the bricks. Her brother Owen is near the wheelbarrow in back, on the other side of an unknown man. ( Her brothers are in the picture, but so are hired men, and as she was blind, she was unable to recall who was exactly where beyond that.) Her sister Orpha is sitting on the wheelbarrow of bricks.

Comments

Cool picture.  I had to go to Inza's profile to see the picture at full resolution to pick out the people you described!

Answer 19

Radio Technician William Tracy Ceruti at work in the Radio Corporation of America, tuning in signals at the relay station in Riverhead, New York, USA. The picture format seems not  to have come out right, but at least you can get an idea from the part of the picture shown here.

Comments

If you click on edit post, then there's an option to edit the picture, and you can set the width to something like 600 so it all shows up on the screen.

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Thank you, Rob, I tried that - 600 wide but it came out the same.

Anyway, I think most people get the idea.

Answer 20

I come from a long line of farmers. This is a picture of the grandfather I knew growing up on the farm with his youngest son, my Uncle Royce, approximately 1960ish. My Grandpa wore those same type of overalls all his life, even long after they had retired to town and no longer farmed.

Comments

Those overalls from that time period are worth good money today!  Who would've thought?