Belle Way and Howard Wickens wedding portrait, 25 September 1901

The wedding portrait of Belle (Belsora A.) Way and Howard Edward Wickens, taken on the day of their marriage at Noble County, Ohio — 25 September 1901. The frame gathers the extended Way-Davis-Matthews family on the porch of the wedding home.

What the photograph carries that nothing else in the archive does: five generations of Chuck’s direct maternal Davis-Way line in one frame, at a moment when all of them were still alive. Four months after this picture was taken, Tacy Matthews Way would die (29 January 1902). Twenty-one months after it, Victoria Anna Way Davis would die (26 June 1903). Within a decade, the bride herself — Belle Way — would also be gone (1912). The wedding is, in retrospect, the last family gathering that held the Way grandparents, the Way-Davis daughters, and the toddler Homer (Chuck’s great-grandfather) together in the same place.

The numbered identification legend

A separate paper legend accompanies the photograph in the family papers, with eleven figures numbered and named. The annotation is most plausibly in the hand of Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth (Chuck’s maternal grandmother), since the relational labels read from her father Homer’s perspective:

The legend reads:

1. Nora Way Hutchens — Belle’s older sister
2. Ernest Hutchens — Nora’s husband
3. Belle Way — the bride (Belsora A. Way, 1880-1912)
4. Howard Wickens — the groom (Howard Edward Wickens, 1880-1964)
5. William A. Davis — labeled “(grandfather)” — husband of Anna, father of Homer
6. Anna Way Davis — labeled “(grandmother)” — Victoria Anna Way Davis, Belle’s older sister, the line that brings this photo into Chuck’s direct ancestry
7. Tacy Matthews — labeled “(great-grandmother)” — mother of Belle and Anna
8. Edward E. Way — labeled “(great-grandfather)” — father of Belle and Anna
9. Emma Way Parker — another Way relative
10. Wallace Hale — relationship not yet researched
11. Homer E. Davis — labeled “(father)” — Belle’s nephew, 20 months old at this wedding, Chuck’s great-grandfather as a toddler

The annotation closes with “Picture taken at the home of Mr. and Mrs. ____” — trailing off; the rest is illegible.

The five-generation line, traced through the frame

Reading the photograph as a genealogical document, Chuck’s direct line runs through five figures here:

• Edward E. Way (#8) — great-great-great-grandfather
• Tacy Elizabeth Matthews (#7) — great-great-great-grandmother
• Victoria Anna Way Davis (#6) — great-great-grandmother
• William Armstrong Davis (#5) — great-great-grandfather
• Homer Edward Davis (#11) — great-grandfather (as a toddler)

Four of the five (#5, #6, #7, #8) are seated as senior figures at the wedding; the fifth (#11) is held or sat near them. The Way-Davis line that runs forward seventy-eight years to Chuck’s December 1979 birth is, on this porch in Noble County in September 1901, standing and seated together in a single photographic instant.

A correction the photograph forced

This portrait is also the document that closed a generational error in this archive. Earlier passes had placed Victoria Anna Way as the daughter of Edward Taylor Way (1812-1879, the English immigrant of the Way newspaper clipping). The ID legend — with Edward E. Way as “great-grandfather” and Victoria as “grandmother” from Dorothy’s perspective — is unambiguous: Edward E. Way is Victoria’s father (one generation below the immigrant Edward Taylor). The GEDCOM trace confirms it. Edward Taylor Way and Anna Ellison are Victoria’s grandparents, not her parents.

The wedding portrait corrected the line.