Grandma and Grandpa Falling In Love

This past week my Mom has had me hard at work scanning lots of pictures for her.  She found a photo album from when my maternal Grandma (Grandma Houtz) was a missionary in Arkansas in 1950.  My little sister has dubbed me the family historian because I've embarked on an ongoing project to digitize every picture we have and make them searchable.  I thought I was pretty much done until this new set of pictures was unearthed.

It can be a lot of work, but it's actually pretty fun, especially when I get to discover hidden treasures.  I'll warn you right now that while I think what I discovered is pretty dang cool, I can't guarantee that you'll find it interesting if you're not related to me.  With that disclaimer, I will now proceed to share some of the fantastic finds from my scanning experiences this week.

This first one is of my Grandma and her parents, presumably right before she left on her mission.  So those are my great grandparents.  Pretty cool, eh?

I had to work with my Mom on terminology while we were doing the scanning.  We were trying to take note of all the pictures that actually had my Grandma in them, so that I could tag them and make then searchable later.  But my Mom kept saying, "This one has Mom in it."  I tried to explain to her that her name is Mom, and since she was not in the picture, it was more correct to say, "This one has Grandma in it."  But she insisted on calling Grandma, "Mom".  When we saw the picture above, she said, "There's Grandma!"  I thought she finally understood, until I realized she was referring to Great Grandma.  Poor confused Madre.

Here are a few other gems.

Grandma playing the ukulele

Is she sad?  Is she mad?  Will the world ever know?

Fun fact about my grandparents:  They actually met as missionaries.  This was 20 years before Spencer W. Kimball's "Lock Your Heart" talk so they didn't have quite the same restrictions as they do today as far as getting to know the missionaries of the opposite sex.

Since I knew they had met on their missions, I had hoped to see pictures of my Grandpa among the set as well.  I fully expected to find pictures like this:

Can you find them?

For your convenience, I circled them.  Click to enlarge.

That was super fun, to see the two of them in the same picture.  But, what I didn't expect was some of the other fantastic pictures.  And while the pictures themselves are fun, it's really the captions that my Grandma put on them that make them awesome.

Look at that stud!  I like her caption at the top, "Hmmmmmmm!!"  What does that even mean?

This one is even better:  "golllleeee!!!"

"Prophet" Houtz.  My Grandpa was a very spiritual man.  But I never realized he was a prophet.

 This next one is probably my favorite.

"Wow!"  That's the best caption ever.  Look at Grandma and Grandpa getting all cray-cray on that bench!

I wish I knew when the captions were added.  Did she do it at the time, which would reveal that she had a thing for him right from the start?  Or did she add those later after they were married?  It's hard to say, but I like to think that  I just showed you pictures of the process of them falling in love.  Either way, what I can definitely say is that all of the chemistry that is going on on that bench clearly worked out, because it resulted in the preciousness that is me:

I know it's an old picture, but Grandma and Grandpa haven't been around for a while now.  And it turns out this is the only picture I have of just me and my Grandpa.

The moral of the story is that family history is pretty cool.  Or maybe the moral is that my Grandma has awesome captions.  Or maybe just that my Grandma is pretty cool.

Let's just go with Grandmas are cool.  I would say I'm pro-Grandma.