Quoting Penny Ladnier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Today I purchased at an antique store a really nice large group photo. I thought you all would like to see it. The cabinet card photo's back is written "Uncle Lem Donahue's home at Sandyville, West Virginia."
My guess is a Church Group. It was the custom to go to a memebers house for Sunday Dinner after the service. Even for a crowd that large. I can remember at my grandparents house, that there would be 2 or 3 tables of preachers, a couple of tables of men, then the women would eat and then the children. Granny fed a *LOT* of folks on Church Sunday. There's a sect of Baptists that you tend to find in the Appalachian Mountains that still have services once a month -- rather than the circuit riding preacher, the congregation moved from church-house to church-house. The practice dated from Colonial Virginia when an individual congregation could only meet once a month unless they were Anglican.
Anyway, I've got a similar photo taken around 1902. My grandfather is one of the children on the front row -- 2 of the 4 sets of Great-GRandparents are under the Welcome sign, and the pastor of this group (this is actually a Methodist Church) was a great-grand-father (He's the person under the umbrella). This was taken at the Odd-Fellows hall on Birchfield in Wise Co., VA.
http://epee.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Genealogy/Images/Misc/odd.fellows-11x14.jpg Susan ----- Susan Farmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Division of Science and Math http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Trillium/ _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
