Photograph Showcase: Joseph & Petrina Skeen with Their Five Oldest Children

This beautiful family photo is particularly special.  The parents are Joseph Skeen and Jane Zina Petrina Folkman, my 2nd great-grandparents.  Joseph and Petrina were the parents of eight children.  Their oldest two children did not experience long lives.

Zina Electa Skeen came first.  She was born in 1900 and died at age 25, unmarried with no children.  Lyman Lamont Skeen was their second child.  He was born in 1901 and died two months shy of his eleventh birthday.  This is the last family photo to include Lamont that I have found so far.

This photo was likely taken in the Fall of 1910 or the Spring of 1911.  Melba, the youngest in the photo, was born in October of 1908, but her younger sister Mae, who was born in December 1911, is not in the photo.  Melba seems to be between two and three years old.  This photo appears to have been taken on a porch.  Based on the clothing and the fact that the family lived in Utah, it probably wasn’t taken in the winter.  Petrina does not appear to be seven months pregnant as she would have been in the early fall of 1911, so our window narrows to the photo having been taken between the Fall of 1910 and the Spring of 1911.

This copy of the photo is glued to an album page with this label written underneath by my Grandma, Mary Margaret Ellis, granddaughter-in-law of Joseph and Petrina:

Happy Thursday, I hope you will scan and share a precious photo very soon!  xoxo