Remembering
Recently
my friend Mike McKenzie from Atlanta sent me several old photographs
of my ancestors, family from two and three generations back. There's a
picture of my great-grandmother Emma Amanda Look Weller,
A
picture that especially interests me is of my great-grandfather Reginald Heber Weller sitting with his six sons. Alfred, Pop to me, was the youngest,
sitting at the left, and I think he was twelve, which makes the
picture perhaps 1884.
Standing behind Alfred is his next older, and
close, brother, my Uncle Charlie. Charles Knight Weller, who was
almost four years older than Pop. Until Mike sent the pictures, I'd
never realized because I only knew him in his seventies and eighties,
but there is a very close resemblance between Uncle Charlie at
sixteen, and me at the same age.
In
the picture are three Episcopal priests. Sitting, my
great-grandfather Reginald Heber Weller, who was called Heber, was
rector of St. John's, Jacksonville, Florida, which is now their diocesan
cathedral. In the center and standing tallest in the picture is my Uncle Heber, R. H.
Weller, Jr. who was in the Diocese of Florida for awhile before being
called to a parish in the Diocese of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where in 1900 he was
elected bishop. Uncle Heber, who died in 1935 about the time I was
born, has been discussed in my blog before, and isn't my main
interest at the moment; which is Uncle Charlie, the third priest (to
be) in the photograph.
Looking at Uncle Heber and Pop, though, brings to mind Pop telling me about the time, I think he went for a year, as a teenager, when he went to Wisconsin to visit and live with Heber and his family. Pop remembered, which entitles me to my own memories, the day, probably a Sunday afternoon, when he took the horse and sleigh out into the snowy day with a girl he was in love with, had a terrible crush on her. And he kissed her. He said, "It was the first time I ever kissed a girl."
Noticing
our resemblance as teenagers, I explored Uncle Charlie online. He was
born in Kentucky, 1868, died in 1954 while I was a freshman at
UFlorida. My father said he “read for Orders,” meaning instead of
seminary he studied for ordination under a mentor. He was ordained deacon at
St. Philip's Cathedral, Atlanta and assigned to the church at College
Park; where in 1909 he was ordained priest, with his brother the bishop of Fond du Lac assisting in his ordination. The 1915 journal of the Diocese of Georgia lists him as having
been transferred (letters dimissory is the term), and the 1915 journal of the Diocese of Alabama
lists him as rector at St. Michael and All Angels, Anniston. Linda's
great-grandfather and his family, the Nobles, who had come from
England, built that church after the Civil War
http://www.stmichaelsanniston.org/our-history/
for
themselves and their employees who had come from England to work in
their iron works. Anyway, Uncle Charlie is there in 1915. This rings
a bell, stirs a memory.
I have here, under my twin-masted schooner
Annie & Jennie, is my uncle's textbook, Outlines
of Greek and Roman History,
William C. Morey. Inside the front cover it's inscribed in his hand,
Alfred Daniel Weller, Jr., St. Michael's Parish School, Anniston,
Alabama. I'd forgotten why Alfred was there, and now it returns to
mind: Mom and Pop sent him there to school because Uncle Charlie was
there. The end of that story, as I recall from my aunt Evalyn, was
that Alf did not do well with his studies, and soon returned home.
Seems to me that EG said that as well as not an especially brilliant
student, he was extremely homesick, longing for home, where he was
the golden boy apple of his parent's eye. I also heard my father use
that phrase about Alfred, "he was the apple of their eye," and his
death nearly destroyed Mom and Pop and our family.
But
Uncle Charlie. If he and I looked alike as teenagers, I wondered what
he looked like later. Online I came across a photograph of him in
vestments, and I'm going to say he must have been sixty-five to
seventy-five.
Linda
says it does resemble me in an excellent photograph that Arthur
Reedie took of me in the pulpit a year or so ago. That picture is on
the same shelf with A&J, and I especially like it.
What
ignited this morning's interest was sitting at my desk in my office at church
yesterday, thumbing through the prayerbook Uncle Charlie gave me on
my 14th
birthday, looking for something about Francis of Assisi. The
prayerbook is one of my treasures. In my teen years I memorized it during sermon time.
Sitting here at my Bay window where through the clearing fog and cloud, I can barely see Davis Point, around which the A&J sailed into the beginning of my own life.
Thos+
in +Time+