My Portfolio

  727 McIndoe Street: Dinon's Wausau home (Present day: Google Maps Street View) It was the Spring of 1942 when the Boyer family  moved 1,200 miles  from  Nahant, MA  to Wausau, WI.  My grandfather, Dinon, was 10 years old at the time, and lived with his family in  a huge white...

  In the Spring of 1942, just a few short months after Pearl Harbor, my 10-year-old grandfather and his family  moved 1,200 miles  from  Nahant, MA  to Wausau, WI. His parents, my great-grandparents Ralph and Babe, had taken on a lot more responsibility in the 12 years since their 1930 marriage....

  On the first day of 1942, my great-grandfather, Ralph Boyer, was living in Nahant, MA with his two young sons and pregnant wife, Babe.  Three weeks before, Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the United States had declared war.  By the spring of 1942, Ralph had accepted a new job...

    Between the ages of 5 and 11 (1936-1942) my grandfather, Dinon, lived on one square mile of land, a peninsula called Nahant off the shore of Massachusetts, just a little northeast of Boston.   Dinon's father, my great-grandfather Ralph, worked on the mainland end of the Nahant causeway in...

In 1930, Ralph and his new bride, Babe, moved to  Pittsfield, Massachusetts  so that Ralph could begin his new job as a chemical engineer for General Electric's plastic division.   In 1936, my great-grandfather Ralph was transferred to General Electric's plant in Lynn.  So he picked up his pregnant wife and...

  One thing I have learned to never under-estimate is the power of old family photos.  The emotional impact, and story-telling power, of a single photo is always incredible to me, even when the photos are of another person's family. So imagine how hard it was for me to breathe when...

  1951: Brooks and Rena, shortly after their wedding    My husband's paternal grandparents, Brooks and Rena, have now been married for 62 years.  One of my favorite stories that Brooks tells is the one of how he and Rena got together. Brooks grew up in a valley 120 miles east...

(Click here to first read Part I) Grandpa Charlie   After resting for six months to recover from starvation in the prisoner-of-war camp in Elmira, NY, and the 400-mile walk home from there, 22-year-old Charlie reenlisted with the Confederacy for the last months of the war. In 1937, 73 years later, Charlie 95...

  Charlie E. McCray My husband, Dave, has Confederate roots.  Since we've been married I've heard his grandfather, Brooks, tell (and repeat) many stories about the McCray family and  what Brooks describes as "a lineage that's pretty hard to beat!" Of all the ancestors in all the stories he's told (and...