10 May 2007

Uncle Dave, is that you?

I somehow stumbled onto a website devoted to old black and white photos. It looked interesting so I started browsing through the collection and then this one popped up - an old photograph of Dave Penland of Beech, North Carolina.

That really grabbed my attention as my fraternal great-grandmother was a Penland from the area around Mars Hill, NC and she had a brother named David. There's no Beech, NC today, but the US Geological Survey Geographic Name Service does show a Beech in Buncombe Co., NC and darned if it isn't about 8 miles or so southeast of the town of Mars Hill.

So, I have to wonder if I'm not looking at a distant relative, a great-uncle perhaps? Then, if so, I really have to wonder just what are the odds of randomly stumbling onto an old photograph of a distant ancestor while surfing the Internet?

Technology, it's all pretty darned amazing and is sure making the world seem a smaller place.

2 comments:

Fish-2 said...

That's an amazingly clean and clear photograph for 1920. Some of those old B&W photographers were wizzards with their equipment.

Anonymous said...

How can you look at the length of that forehead and not know that this is, indeed, our ole Uncle Dave?