The Three Davis Sisters with Puppies — Dorothy, Betty, and Mary, c. 1931

The third of the Davis-sisters frames in the 1990 Heritage — Dorothy, Betty, and Mary outside on grass, each holding a small puppy, all three barefoot. The typed caption Robert Earl added beneath the print is one of the warmest lines of his entire genealogical voice in the document: “Cute little puppies and cute little bare feet.” It is a rare moment where the retired Air Force navigator’s prose, kept tight and disciplined across twenty-four pages of family research, opens for a sentence into something closer to a grandfather’s voice.

What it documents

Paired with the c. 1930 “why so glum?” frame on the same page of the Heritage, this is the lighter of the two: the same three sisters about a year later, in the kind of summer-yard frame that ran through Ohio childhoods of the period. The puppies and the bare feet are the small textures of the Unionville backyard before the house fire that would relocate the household.

The three Davis girls in this frame are the same three who, ninety years later, would still be running through Chuck’s childhood in different forms — Dorothy as his maternal grandmother, Betty as his great-aunt and the wife of Uncle Norm the Wolfe-side anchor, Mary as the sister who stayed in Ohio. The kinship that runs through the Norm and Betty Wolfe Thanksgiving 2011 frame and the Wolfe-Wildermuth long-visiting tradition named in Terrie’s 2017 obituary starts here, in three small girls on a Washington County summer lawn.

Source: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990 — Davis section.