My cousin Nancy came to town a couple weeks ago with a number of her immediate family members to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of her mother, my Aunt Vivian, seen here as a babe in arms. Not only did Nancy bring cousins whom I’d never met before or hadn’t seen since the 1960s (her brother, her nephew and niece, her son) but she also brought big posters full of photographs of Vivian’s family, some very old and some more recent. A few of them I’d seen before, but most of them were new to me, and Nancy gave me copies so I could post some of them here.
James Ezra Fleagle with his mother-in-law Margaret (Foster) Coffin and four of his eventual six children, from right: Jim, Miriam, Ben, and baby Vivian. 1925 or 1926. Click to view a larger version.
This is one of the most interesting ones to me. It’s Aunt Vivian as a baby, surrounded by her entire family (I imagine that her mother Jennie, whom we later called Granny, might have been behind the camera here), including her maternal grandmother. Two more children joined the family a few years later, first my Uncle Dick and finally my father, Willard, and it strikes me that whenever I’ve thought of this family I’ve thought of the entire half-dozen children. But this is a moment in their history when Vivian was the youngest. So here we have Maggie Coffin, born Margaret Foster in Ontario; her son-in-law James; and her grandchildren Jim, Miriam, Ben and Vivian. Both of the girls are still with us, but everyone else in the family has long since passed, including the two boys who came later.
Says Nancy, “Granny gave me this one years ago in a tiny white broken plastic frame, a real treasure of mine. She was typically good about naming photos. Since Mom was born in 1925 and Miriam is five years older, I’d say 1925-26.”
Location is unknown, but it makes sense that this could be the house on Walstan Avenue in Reisterstown outside Baltimore, where James and Jennie raised their family. It may also be grandmother Maggie’s house, though I don’t have any knowledge that she lived in Maryland or that she didn’t. If you know, please comment.
For an even larger version of this photo click here. – mdf
Image archive ID:
20150515_001_fleagles_of_reisterstown
About the physical photograph:
I think this is a photograph of a photograph.
Written on back (thanks to Nancy Stake for reporting this data):
“Maggie Coffin with James Fleagle, and children, Jim, Miriam, Ben, Vivian (the baby)”
Fleagle and Dowell Family History in Photos 
If I have done the arithmetic correctly I think Miriam was born in 1920. Granny always said there was a long stretch before Ben arrived and then in was Ben, Vivian and Dick … bang, bang, bang. She referred to this “batch’ as THE TRIPLETS. I think all this pretty much did her in. Four years later along came Willard.
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I must have been tired when I wrote the text accompanying this photo above. The house in the photo is made of brick. The Walstan house was white clapboard. I’ve recently discovered that James and Jennie lived with their family at Fenwick Avenue before they moved “out of the city” to Reisterstown and the Walstan Avenue house. As it happens, Fenwick was, and still is a neighborhood of row houses that look just like the house in this photo. What I don’t know is whether the family lived there so long that Vivian was a baby there. My assumption had always been that they lived in at Walstan when Vivvy was born. But this is definitely not Walstan.
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