Mom liked taking pictures, as we all ruefully came to learn, going back to when she was young. She collected quite a few showing her family covering 1929 to 1939 and organized them in a photo album with seven sections. Her arrangement has been preserved here. Some explanatory notes have been added.
1. “The Family”
Fifteen photographs, including the earliest ones of Mom’s brothers and sisters. The first two are the earliest pictures of Ellen and Gerry in the archive and one of the earliest of Jack. Kevin, of course, is the star of the album, with the majority of the pictures devoted to him.
Some of the pictures, like the third and fifth ones, are in the same settings as pictures in other sections, such as the Port Washington vacation in 1936 (further below), but Mom placed them here for some reason.
This section also contains three pictures of Mom’s cousins, Paul Dondero (1921-1975) and Edward (‘Ned’) (1919-1998), the sons of John and Margaret Dondero, the latter being Nana’s sister, Margaret Guiney (Mom’s Aunt Madge).
The ‘Guiney Family’ post provides some genealogical information about Nana, her parents, and her sisters, including Madge’s ever-changing birth date.
2. School Friends 1929-1939
Pictures mostly of Mom’s Mount Mary friends whose identities for the most part have been lost to time. Several, however, are of Mom’s close friend Inez Dretzka (later Milinovich). More pictures of Inez and her family are in the post on her. A few others appear elsewhere, too.
Mom’s in a mischievous mood in the third photo, and the first is an especially nice picture of her.
Although the pictures are primarily of her Mount Mary friends, Mom also included six taken between 1929 and 1932 when she was in her early teens and show friends, probably from St. Mary’s Academy. The Tekakwitha Lodge of the tenth picture was a Catholic summer camp for girls opened in 1932 near Shawno, WI, about 35 miles NW of Green Bay.
The Lodge was named for the Lily of the Mohawks, Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), an Algonquin-Mohawk laywoman whose claim on saintliness wasn’t some grisly martyrdom but a vow of lifelong virginity, for which she was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2012. Dead at 24, hers was not a long burden to bear. The message being sent to Catholic schoolgirls with the camp’s name seems a little heavy-handed even for the 1930s. Her holy card wasn’t originally part of the archive; it’s been added for those who can appreciate religious kitsch.
3. Middle 1930s
Eight of the thirteen pictures in this section are of Kevin Kortsch, clearly the darling baby of the family, having been born twenty years after the first child, Pat (b. 1912) and six years after Gerry, his next oldest sibling. He knew it, too, as is plain in some of the pictures. Mom doted on him. He has the most pictures devoted to him in the entire photo album. Her affection was returned. His obituary makes special mention of Mom: “. . . Preceded in death by his brothers and sisters, and his beloved Margaret. . . .”
4. Forest Beach Camp (August 1936)
A vacation trip with Mom’s friends and sister Ellen taken in 1936, just a few months after Mom turned 21.
The last picture wasn’t attached to this part of the album but looks like it might have been taken at the camp (see the album’s last section).
Forest Beach Camp is gone now but may have been located a little north of Port Washington, where the Forest Beach Migratory Preserve is now sited. According to official accounts of the Preserve, the land was once a golf course built in the 1930s and sold in 2008 to the Ozaukee-Washington Land Trust for restoration as a migratory shorebird habitat. Ideally located for that purpose on the Lake Michigan Flyway, it’s visited by numerous bird species on their migration route from Canada and the Arctic to South America, navigating their way by using Lake Michigan’s shore as a north-south sight line. The golf course was situated some 600 feet inland but the property also included an extensive beach area, which may be where Mom and her friends are enjoying the sun. However, the few available contemporaneous pictures of the area don’t show the sort of camp buildings that can be seen in the fifth picture.
5. Port Washington (Summer 1936)
Eight pictures of a family vacation taken to Port Washington in the summer of 1936.
6. College Graduation (June 1937)
Seven pictures taken for Mom’s graduation from Mount Mary. One other picture is added here that wasn’t originally in her photo album: her senior portrait from the 1937 yearbook. It seemed appropriate to include it here.
7. Unclassified Pictures
Fourteen pictures enclosed loosely in the album instead of being affixed to pages. There’s a picture of the rear of the Kortsch family house in Bay View, but most of them are of a family whose relationship to Mom’s family isn’t known. They must have been fairly close, though, because a number of them are of the same young young woman in family groups and as a bride, for whom Mom acted as a bridesmaid.
There is also a picture of a different bride, also unknown, but it’s an earlier picture than the others based on the style of her dress and the quality of the photograph itself.
