Blog December 8, 2020 by Nancy Jean

This is one of my favorite ancestral photographs. I want to introduce you to the women in this family. 

Julia Frances Slayden Hamlett sits at the head of the table. She was my Papa's only sister. Her husband died in 1905, and Great-Aunt Julia still wore black years later. She never remarried. Although she mourns her husband's early death, she clearly enjoys the company of her three grown daughters who sit at this table. Isn't this a great dining area? The table was large enough at which all the women in this family could gather comfortably. 

Julia's three daughters sit around her. Katalee Hamlett Laws, Ruth Lucille Hamlett Fry, and Claire Frances Hamlett Root. Katalee is the young woman in animated speech. She died in 1931, too young. The elder woman who looks as if she talks at the same time with Katalee is the step-mother of Julia, Florence Butler Slayden. As you can tell, this second wife of Julia's father was loved. Florence married Julia's father, William Daniel Everett Slayden, very soon after his young wife died. She raised his several children. Florence was the deserved matriarch of this Slayden family for nearly 50 years. 

Also sitting at this large family table are two of Julia's sister-in-laws, Susan Orena Miles Slayden and Hallie Haltman Slayden.  I don't know much about the women, partly because I never met them!  Everything I've learned has been through my ancestry research, family conversations, old newspaper articles, and these photographs. Susan Orena never had children. Hallie had several. But there are no children in the room. And I am happy to imagine that the fathers are outdoors with the children while these women, who probably prepared all the food and cleaned afterwards as well, have their time. Time to speak candidly and earnestly without interruption, without the usual deference to the men's conversations. Time to laugh with each other. 

I've come to the best part of this photograph. Someone has pulled a chair away from the table to photograph the rest of the women. Someone who sits at eye level with them, not above them. I think my grandmother, Hilda Martha Mueller Slayden, is the woman who took the picture. Hilda married into the Slayden family in April, 1919. My Papa was 40 and she was 22 when they married in St Louis, Missouri, before returning to his medical practice in West Virginia. This gathering was in Tennessee where most of the Slayden and Hamlett family lived. Maybe the family gathered to celebrate the marriage of Noah Thomas Slayden and Hilda Martha Mueller! 

The exact date of this occasion is not known but, I place it in the 1919 to 1925 range, before one family, the Marshall Elial Slayden family, moves to Detroit to get work in the auto industry, before my Papa and Hilda move to Sweetwater, Texas in 1928 to establish his medical there where my mother is born, before Katalee's death in 1931 and Hilda's death in 1929. This occasion takes place in a time that requires a great deal of planning and travel for large families to unite.  Even the women's long clothing and the long hair wound in buns marks a period prior to radical changes in style. The 1920s were radical. Although Tennessee was then a comfortable, old, slow-moving place, the younger women in the photograph do not show distinctive differences in style from the older women.  1919 is a solid bet for the date of this photograph. That my grandmother Hilda is the photographer is also a solid bet. We have a scrapbook that she kept during her college years. Hilda loved to take photographs and capture the important moments and people in her life. 

There is so much more to tell about the time and place. The race riots and white men's brutality against black people, women's suffrage movement, an era of spectacular literature and music--distinctly American, women's lack of specialized medical care,  westward movement that my Papa and Hilda bought into when they moved from Florida to Texas. 

But this photograph is about women's joys. Women who appreciate each other, enough to require time alone, to ask that the men watch their children, so much so that my grandmother Hilda purposely scoots her place away from the table to capture this joyous moment of women's conversation. Of women's love for each other. 

Within a few years of this photograph, these women are never together again. I would love to have the letters they shared with each other.