The picture shows G.A. (Guy Ashford Wood) and his wife, Esther, in their home on Hamilton Ave., Detroit MI in 1922, both in their 40s. This was after they'd moved from Buffalo NY as newlyweds and before they moved on to Walnut St. in Ann Arbor to buy and manage a rooming house for University of Michigan students. When this picture was taken, they had two young children, Junior (Guy) and Sara Jane.
I remember my grandmother saying that after trying both male and female students as roomers, she settled on only men because they were easier to deal with. Like my father, she had strong, definite opinions - nothing wishy-washy about her! Also like John, Esther was very interested in politics and current events.
Esther's first husband was Charles Kellogg, who had died in 1913. She had been married at 18 and had two children with Charles as well - John Webb and Dorothy Helen.
"By luck I was born into a family which knew gracious living. One of my earliest memories is my Mother, a young, attractive woman with a flat velvet ribbon around her hair to keep it in place. One day I asked her why she wore that kind of decoration when none of the other ladies did. The next day she appeared with her hair fluffed around a metal form called a 'rat.' We have a 1907 picture of her dressed in that manner with her two children.
Actually she was much younger than the other women she knew. As a farm girl, at an early age she learned to make her clothes. Her next step was to do dressmaking in Buffalo NY. At the age of 18 she married my Father, a widower about 44. The farm was on Grand Island, which is in the Niagara River below Buffalo and above Niagara Falls."
I recall a few early pictures of Grandmother Wood, but haven't seen them in years. I'm sure that I saw the picture my father mentioned from 1907, but it may have been on a wall in Ann Arbor. Sad that old pictures, letters, journals so often are lost in the dust of time.
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