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| Photo of the Month Index |
| Your Guide to Minerd.com's Monthly Photo Feature from January 2016 to December 2020 |
| See all years 2000-2005 - 2006-2010 2011-2015 - 2016-2020 - 2021-present |
~ 2020 ~
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December 2020 - Continuing in a series promoting authors in the family, Thomas Beck holds a poster showing the covers of his seven books. His four-volume "Tommy Two Shoes" series features a fictional Pittsburgh detective, named appropriately enough Tommy "Two Shoes" Minerd. |
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November 2020 - The late Kent Milton Paser of Littleton, CO spent his career pursuing his passion, aviation. This Mustang II airplane, which he built in his home, is now preserved in the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver. |
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October 2020 - At a time when our nation is sharply and bitterly divided in politics, Rev. Dr. William “Bradford” Harbaugh of the Capitol Commission in North Carolina oversees a team of non-denominational, non-partisan, non-political ministers who bring a pastoral presence, prayer and biblical guidance to governing leaders and staff of both major parties throughout the USA. |
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September 2020 - Having just returned home from a mission trip to Haiti, where she was
preparing to adopt a baby girl, and with plans to work for a non-profit
overseas, 26-year-old photographer Jamilyn Renee Hull faced a very bright future. |
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August 2020 - The old Pennsylvania-German
art of "fraktur" was utilized by many early families to maintain an
heirloom record their births and deaths. This example is from the family of William "Shedrick" and Caroline (Cupp)
Younkin of near Rockwood, Somerset County, PA. |
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July 2020 - First-time author and long-time theatrical manager
Mary "Michele" Miner of Los Angeles signs copies of her new novel, Their Moon Was Cardboard, published earlier this year. |
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June 2020 - Among the more well-known branches of our family in southwestern Pennsylvania was the Rev. David Ewing and Sarah Catherine (Williams) Minerd clan of Dunbar, Fayette County. |
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May 2020 - Alfred Arthur "Alf" Younkin, a trombonist with the Casselman (PA) Cornet Band in the years before he and his wife became pioneer apple growers in Washington State. |
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April 2020 - Lucinda (Steyer) Minerd and her mother Celesta Ann (Growall) Steyer of Mill Run, PA tend chickens at the family's coop in this image from the 1910s. |
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March 2020 - For five years, in the
mid-to-late 1910s, Kathryn "Kate"
Miner taught in one-room schools of Springfield Township, Fayette County, PA. She had her hands especially full teaching and keeping discpline at Fairmont
School because among her pupils were her eight younger siblings. |
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February 2020 - His fragile back horribly distorted by a Civil War injury, William Henry Beltz of Schellsburg and Pittsburgh, PA bore the apparance of a hunchback for the rest of his long life, worsening as time went on. |
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January 2020 - Ohio natives Harland Wynn Tucker of Toledo and Marie Walcamp of Dennison were
heartthrob movie stars of the silent film era who married each other. |
~ 2019 ~
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December 2019 - For the second straight year, Minerd.com presents an unusual, almost 100-year-old image of Santa Claus on the cover of the Missouri Pacific Lines (MOPAC) railroad company magazine, a publication edited by Edward Harlan "E.H." McReynolds.Ohio natives Harland Wynn Tucker of Toledo and Marie Walcamp of Dennison were movie stars of the silent film era who married each other. |
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November 2019 - The lives of convicted horse thief Charles Pierce and deputy sheriff Henry B. "Teddy" Frank of Bloomington, IL collided and ended savagely on the evening of Oct. 1, 1881 in what has been called McLean County's only documented lynching. |
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October 2019 - Charming sketch depicting the Illinois farmscape of Civil War veteran William Hawkins and his wife Duanna Burgoin, originally published in the 1889 book, Portrait and Biographical Album of Vermilion and Edgar Counties Illinois. |
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September 2019 - The SS Norman B. Ream, an iron ore hauling steamship on the Great Lakes, named for one of our cousins, fabricated by Chicago Ship Building Company and operated by U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh Steamship Division. |
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August 2019 - Like daughter, like father. The late Jack Hawker postumously has joined his daughter Lisa Lynn Lizzie-Ann (Hawker) Janoske in the West Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame. |
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July 2019 - Corning, New York native Alice Lucille Wydman was a well-known professional big band singer of the 1930s, '40s and early '50s who toured the world with her husband and bandleader, Billy Bishop. |
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June 2019 - Born in Wheeling, WV, Charles "Robert" Henshaw became a noted vaudeville entertainer who made a name for himself in national and international circles. The trade magazine Box Office credits him with having "introduced the ukulele to England," Variety once called him a "vaudevillian known for his prowess on the ukulele" and the New York Clipper dubbed him "The Human Ukulele." |
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May 2019 - Maria (Mensch) Gaumer, of the Lehigh Church community of Alburtis, Lehigh County, seated at her wheel. Her hair is pulled back tightly, following the style of the era, and she wears what appears to be a more formal dress. |
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April 2019 - Muhlenberg College professor Dr. Preston Albert Barba passes time aboard the S.S. Bremen in 1925 during one of his 40 annual research trips to Europe. His research and writings provide a remarkable window into the German cultural values which our people brought to Pennsylvania but have largely disappeared. |
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March 2019 - Highly decorated Pennsylvania German "taufschein" certificate, circa 1851, a combination of printed and hand-colored with lettering in German to celebrate the birth and baptism of David "Wilson" Fegely of Lower Macungie Township, Lehigh County, PA. |
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February 2019 - Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Hazel Forbes, who gave up her stage career to marry wealthy Ohio businessman Paul Owen Richmond, only to become widowed after less than a year. |
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January 2019 - The crew of the doomed World War II bomber, Little Sheppard, shot down over Evreux, France just four days after D-Day, June 1944. Cousin T/Sgt. Howard Lepley, radioman/gunner, stands second from right. |
~ 2018 ~
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December 2018 - Santa Claus graces the cover of the December 1927 issue of the Missouri Pacific Lines Magazine of the regional midwestern railroad which made significant expansions into Texas and Louisiana in the 1920s and '30s, a publication edited by Edward Harlan "E.H." McReynolds. |
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November 2018 - Taking a well-earned nap, the usually energetic Christian Stoner and Esther Resler (Barnhouse) Freed rest in the garden on their farm on Trotter Hill about two miles west of Connellsville, Fayette County, PA, circa 1920. |
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October 2018 - Rev. George Gaumer -- "a man of gentle and irenic spirit" -- whose career pastoring Evangelical Lutheran churches in Ohio and Pennsylvania was checkered with turmoil among members, but whose legacy was characterized by friends as "a humble minister, a kind pastor, and a true sympathetic friend, meek and guileless, like Nathaniel, and loving, like John." |
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September 2018 - Farmer Ida Ellen (Farabee) Taylor behind the reins of her horse and buggy near her home in Hundred, Wetzel County, WV, in an image likely photographed by her son-in-law. |
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August 2018 - The haunting image of the disabled, popular teenager James William Minerd (right), who drowned while at play with friends, rafting in a coal mine reservoir in the now-defunct town of Helen in Fayette County, PA. |
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July 2018 - The Hopwood Band at the base of the mountains near Uniontown, PA, circa 1908, featuring cousin-musicians Joseph M. Hopwood, Simeon Thomas Goff and Lea Ray (Goff) Phillips Guyton, among others from the community. |
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June 2018 - Electric bass player and new West Virginia Country Music Hall of Famer Lisa Lynn Lizzie-Ann (Hawker) Janoske, who has performed with such Nashville stars as the Hagar Twins from Hee Haw, Doyle Holly, the Statler Brothers, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Herb Humphrey and Lynn Anderson |
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May 2018 - Clara (Leonard) Holt, whose farm was located 12 miles east of historic Fort Necessity and included the "Camp of the Twelve Springs" where George Washington and his beaten army camped there after surrendering Fort Necessity in 1754, and where British General Edward Braddock made an encampment in 1755. |
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April 2018 - The tragic Nettie (White) Bailey, a pioneer settler of south-central Kansas, whose impassioned letters to her sister Helen (White) Clark back in Missouri -- written over a five-year span prior to Nettie's death in a freak 1889 lightning storm -- are preserved today in the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka and on Minerd.com. |
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March 2018 - John David Evans, a veteran Pittsburgh railroader, who was a victim of a fiery accident at work for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad one frigid night in January 1924. |
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February 2018 - Solomon "Sollie" Sturtz and his wife Elizabeth, natives of Somerset County, PA, were pioneer settlers of Ohio, and Indiana before settling for good on a farm in Greene, Butler County, Iowa. The parents of nine children, they lost a son and several nephews during the Civil War. |
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January 2018 - Circa July 1920, first aid and mine rescue teams line up in foul territory at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, where they competed in a contest organized by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, including Richard C. Reese's squad from the Standard Mine in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, PA. |
~ 2017 ~
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December 2017 - Jack and Carol (Surber) Lewis, of the family of Anna Belle (Miner) McCormick, display his inaugural title of fiction, Storm Coming: A Novel of the Civil War in Western Virginia. |
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November 2017 - The bizarre, surreal case of swastika-wearing Count Anastase Vonsiatsky, husband of Marion (Ream) Stephens, who from 1933 until his arrest in 1942 served as Vozhd, or leader, of the All-Russian Fascist Organization based in Connecticut. |
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October 2017 - Milton McMillan, deputy county sheriff, was severely wounded in the line of duty in 1890, prompting one newspaper to ask, "In the whole history of
Somerset County, or for that matter of any other county in Pennsylvania,
who has done a braver act than that of Milton R. McMillan ... when the
Nicely brothers, convicted murders, attempted to escape?" |
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September 2017 - Norman B. Ream, born in 1844 in a log cabin in Ursina, PA, survived two Civil War wounds and a disastrous fire to venture to Chicago, help build some of the nation's mightiest industrial and cultural empires, and then become a very wealthy man in New York City, working with the country's most influential businessmen, including the founders of U.S. Steel. |
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August 2017 - Appointed by President Woodrow Wilson, Austin Bruce "A.B." Garretson meets with fellow members of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in Washington, DC. |
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July 2017 - Magdalene and Opal Deola Mayle were two years apart in age and about as close as sisters could be during the Great Depression years in the coal mining town of Meriden near Philippi, Barbour County, WV -- until the Grim Reaper of Death cleaved one away in the August heat of 1935. |
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June 2017 - Standing at attention at far left, Civil War veteran Jerome B. Jennings poses with his fellow members of the Ross Rush Post of the Grand Army of the Republic at the historic burying ground of the 1775 Turkeyfoot Baptist Church, later renamed the Jersey Baptist Church, near Ursina, Somerset County, PA. |
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May 2017 - Only one known member of our extended family has played Major League Baseball -- whose career spanned two games for the Milwaukee Brewers in September 1974 after being called up from the Sacramento Solons. |
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April 2017 - A parade believed to include Civil War veterans makes its way through the
unpaved streets of Kingwood, Preston County, WV on the Fourth of July 1910, with James Eyster Murdock -- wounded four times during the war -- likely one of the old soldiers. |
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March 2017 - American tourists Gordon and Marjean (Miner) Jones, in Rome on vacation, stand in line to pay their respects to Pope Paul VI, who died on Aug. 6, 1978 after having served as Holy Father for 15 years. |
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February 2017 - An example of the creative work produced by professional photographer Clarence "Edward" Grove who operated his own studio in the 1910s in Uhrichsville, Ohio. |
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January 2017 - Andrew Jacob Sturtz, while on guard duty as a member of the 6th U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, fainted in the hot July sun during the execution by hanging of the four co-conspirators convicted in the assassination of President Lincoln -- Mary Surratt, George Atzerodt, David Herold and Lewis Powell. |
~ 2016 ~
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December 2016 - Jeff Minerd -- the guest speaker at our national reunion in July 2000 on the topic of "21st Century Families" -- has published his first book, a fantasy adventure novel named The Sailweaver's Son. |
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November 2016 - Outspoken cousin Heinrich "Henry" Schanckweiler, husband of Elisabetha Gaumer of Lehigh County, PA, arrested at the order of President John Adams for speaking out on what he believed to be his legal rights as a taxpayer. |
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October 2016 - In October 1944, having sold his farm near Cadiz, OH, Ebenezer Bell "E.B." Polen held a public auction, offering for bidding his cattle, hogs, chickens, hay, grain, farm implements and household goods. To advertise the sale, he had this poster printed on orange paper. |
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September 2016 - Having witnessed horrific fighting with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific during World War II, Frank "Buddy" Enos and his wife Mary Louise settled in Mt. Pleasant, PA, where their home was widely admired for its beautiful hanging flowers. |
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August 2016 - Civil War veteran and wagon-maker Cyrus Lindley serving on the first grand jury following construction of the new Washington County Courthouse in Pennsylvania. |
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July 2016 - Of the many reunions of various branches of our Pennsylvania German family, none was as large in size and scope as the Younkin National Home-Coming Reunion of 1934-1941. Held at the IOOF Picnic Grove in Kingwood, Somerset County, PA, they drew more than 1,000 people a year during the heart of the Great Depression. |
| June 2016 - none | |
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May 2016 - Michael A. McVay, born in Mt. Pleasant and raised in Youngwood, PA, is senior vice president of content and programming for Cumulus Media and Westwood One Radio Networks, known for combining high-quality local programming with iconic, nationally syndicated media, sports and entertainment brands. |
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April 2016 - Civil War surgeon Dr. Ralph Wardlaw Cummings of Maine -- and his wife Eunice "Flora" Miner of Indiana -- who served with the 1st Michigan Infantry, 23rd Michigan Infantry and 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. |
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March 2016 - Civil rights activist and lawyer Frank Ruff Parker III spent his career advocating for the rights of minorities to vote in and to win elections in Mississippi and other bastions of bigotry in the United States. He is the author of the highly acclaimed 1990 book Black Votes Count. |
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February 2016 - Laura Jane "Jennie" (Minerd) Williams, one of the earliest teachers in our family, and an unintended historian of the clan who chronicled many of the Minerd-Miner reunions of the late 1920s and early '30s in the Huntingdon (PA) Daily News newspaper. |
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January 2016 - The day before her 100th birthday in 1911, several hundred relatives and friends turned out at a dinner honoring Rachel (Gaumer) Bell at New Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church, a congregation her grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts had co-founded a century before in the wilds of Muskingum County, Ohio. |
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Copyright © 2016-2020 Mark A. Miner |