A Day at the Beach...

Let's kick off the return of Chatter ::don't look at how long since the last post, don't look, don't look...::—now that I have the time, an updated computer, a very good Internet connection, and an ever-increasing frustration with the limitations of social media apps—with a summer-themed post in mid-October. (Ah, well, I actually wrote this in February. ::eye roll::)

I have also, finally, gotten my hands on the box of old family photos. ::big grin::

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So, let's begin...

On August of 1925, at Cape May, New Jersey.

The Baugh-Larson Family

The boy on the right is my maternal grandfather—my brother's dead-ringer of a doppelgänger, as it turns out—and the boy on the left is his older brother (great uncle). Luckily someone had dated the pile of beach vacation photos that was passed down through the generations; unluckily, and despite knowing better, no one ever took the time to record who those other people were while there was still someone alive who could identify them…

Not wanting to get overly-upset with now-unanswerable questions about just who all of those young ladies were, I started wondering if it would be possible to identify the location where the photo was taken, something beyond "Cape May". I shot off a message to a local amateur historian asking if they knew anything about Shields Atlantic Baths. (Were they the same Shields of Peter Shields Inn fame?) They responded that they'd keep an eye on old postcards to see if anything turned up.

Ok, that sounded like a good place to start... Gotta love Google: A search for "Shields Atlantic Baths" got me nowhere, but a search for old postcards from Cape May struck pay dirt. Images of old postcards and photos led me to blog posts about old Cape May and then, by sheer dumb luck, I found the one-in-a-million postcard (on a blog in a "Then and Now" type article) that could give me a starting point from which to—without ever leaving my comfy chair—pinpoint by way of Google Earth Street View almost exactly where our family photo was taken in August of 1925...

The Seven Sisters, aka Atlantic Terrace. Images from CapeMay.com

The windows and roof eaves match, as does the point of view from the street (near enough).

The building in the background on the left in my photo is, with little doubt in my mind, the first in line of the Seven Sisters, aka Atlantic Terrace. Cruising down the street digitally in Google Earth put me in almost the same spot as the bench—more or less the corner of Jackson and Beach. Which would make sense, as that is only two blocks over and about three blocks down from where the train station used to be at Washington and Ocean.

Image from Google Earth Street View, present day. Nearly 100 years later and it is still a little row of tourist shops! Missing some of the grand old homes, however. (And the laundry line full of wash hanging out to dry.)

Southernmost New Jersey, 1931. (I knew South Cape May existed once-upon-a-time, but not to that extent! What hadn't been washed away by repeated storms was purposefully removed; the area was then used as cattle pasturage for awhile and is now protected land held by The Nature Conservancy.)

Train station at Washington and Ocean, star is the Seven Sisters;

probable bench location at Jackson and Beach.

My mother’s father’s family used to come in by train from out near Pittsburgh (can you imagine?!); the maternal paternal great-grands had a house on one of the lagoons in Avalon, my grandparents built farther down Seven Mile Island the year before I was born, and my great uncle ended up with a summer house in Ocean City. Which means we started out Shoobies (for shoe box lunches brought in by day-trippers), became local shoobies (property owners), and I turned full-on local when I purchased a year-round property in the county. I actually missed being a native—born, if not bred—by a mere two days; mom wasn't sure if the hospital had a maternity ward at the time but she did have a guaranteed spot at the Navy hospital in Philadelphia. And I was back down to the shore at a mere two weeks old. 

Surprisingly to us, a little digging into our ancestry by my brother turned up an Avalon connection on our father's side as well! We come from generations of salty hair and sandy toes...