Resemblance

My father's mother passed away when he was 29 years old. I was born when he was 36 years old, so I never met her in this life. However, Ina Lenora Craner Silvers is very special to me, and my father's love and devotion to his mother is one of the important threads in our family narrative. He has told us countless stories of her singing, her tenderness, her vulnerability, her sadnesses, and also her beauty and vivacity. She did not have an easy life, and I am moved to tears when I think of some of her trials. But I am grateful to have such a sense of who she was from the stories of my dad. I suppose that is one of the purposes of genealogy, to forge relationships between generations, even when ancestors and progenitors have never met.

My Aunt Sherry posted these pictures on Facebook, two of me and one of Grandma Ina, just this week, and I wanted to share them here. I've always pictured my grandmother as a lovely woman, but it is a different photograph than this one that I summon when thinking about her. I did not know how much I looked like her, and feel so touched to discover this resemblance between me and someone I would like very much to know.