When I remember my paternal great grandmother, Florence Nightingale (Gurin) Maynard (1883-1970) I remember an old woman. As I was only 8 years old when she passed, I didn’t even fully understand our relationship: that she was my great grandmother, mother to my paternal grandmother, only that she was elderly and we called her ‘Grandma Maynard’. That is the version of her I carried in my mind. But she wasn’t always old. Once she was a young woman standing beside the man she had chosen to marry, with an entire lifetime still waiting ahead of them.

I have a couple of photos of my great grandparents taken in the years after their wedding portrait, and there is something unusually wonderful about them. In an era when photographs, even ones taken at casual events, were often stiff and serious, these two somehow let their affection slip through. They hold hands, they wrap their arms around one another, they are playful. And even as their faces aged and the years accumulated, that little spark between them remained.

Looking at these photographs reminds me of something genealogy can make surprisingly easy to forget: our ancestors weren’t born old. They were once young and vibrant, they fell in love, they laughed and flirted – and long before they became the solemn faces in our family trees they were simply people living their lives.

This is one of my very favorite photos of my great grandparents. Even though they are older, they are still holding hands and touching one another. Over the course of their marriage, they had a total of five children, three daughters and two sons. One of their daughters, Elizabeth (Maynard) Manley was my grandmother.