FAMILY PHOTOS ON MY FATHER'S SIDE

Sam and Beulah Strachan and Bruce Bennett Strachan with his BS in Agriculture from Oregon State College.  This is my father and the family hope, sent ahead to Corvallis to be an attachment point when the family came to Portland.  His thesis was about potatoes.  His first employment was mostly about sheep as a wool-buyer.  He was not the first college degree.  Sam earned his in Scotland but I don't know more than that.  Sam immigrated to South Dakota with his birth family and worked as a school superintendent in Faulkton, S.D. while homesteading.  Beulah took the claim next to his and taught school.  Faulkton was available for homesteading because of the removal of the Brulé Sioux

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Top: Sam and Beulah plus the three women: my mother, May, and Elsie. My mother and Elsie were married to Bruce and Glenn.  May was married to Murdock Maclean. The handsome military man was Seth, my father's youngest brother and the only one who became prosperous, a TWA pilot.  At retirement he was cut down by a stroke that left him frustrated and angry.  My father had a concussion in 1948 that subtly changed him and as he grew older suffered from some kind of personality change and Parkinson's.    Glenn, the man holding Ross my cousin, was a real estate man.  "Doc", 3rd from left, was spry and curious right up to the end and had to end a vegetative state by withholding water.  My cousin Diane and I are in the front, me on the right.  The laughing boy near my mother is Mark, my brother.  May had Alzheimers in old age.  Elsie had a period of deep depression as a young mother, then recovered and was fine until death.  She was an outstanding published poet.  When my father failed, my mother became an elementary school librarian.

So this was a web of tragedy and triumph stretching through many perils and strategies.



A slightly more recent photo of the same sibs.  Seth is gone.  A little neighbor girl managed to join the group -- she's the one on the left end of kids.  Even that early, Ross was wearing suspenders and tie.  He's my age but we're nothing like the same style.



FLASHBACK:  This might be Canada, after marriages but before children.  My father is on the floor because he set the self-snap mechanism on the camera.  May, who is considered a bit of a princess and who is devoted to my father, is on the arm of the sofa.  Beulah is sitting a little hidden to conceal iodine deprivation which has given her a goiter and motivated the soon move to Portland where there is seafood. On the end of the sofa are Noma and Stewart McClure, a deeply in love couple who never had children.  Noma taught one-room schools in Oregon and Stewart, who was deaf, kept a marvelous garden in Silverton.

Sam Strachan is in the back corner.  Seth is the stunningly sultry man in the rocking chair, already involved in flying small canvas airplanes in fields, "barn-storming".  Doc is farthest on the right.  These people were tight with each other in Canada and for a long time the ties persisted in Oregon, until after the next generation arrived.




Wedding pic of Beulah Swan Finney and Sam Strachan, who had no middle name.  He just added another S because it sounded dignified.   "Swan" is a Metis name but no one ever suggested that family was actually Metis.  From photos, they easily could be.  The Swans and Finneys were Michigan people from the southwestern quadrant.  The photo below is in the last years, early in the Fifties.