Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Relatives With Facial Hair

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  This week we're going to look for men's facial hair in our photograph collections.

2)  Find one or more photographs of men in your ancestral families that have facial hair - a mustache and/or a beard. 

3)  Show the photograph if you have it and tell us a bit about the person shown.   If you don't have a digital photograph, please describe the man and his facial hair the best you can.

4)  Write your own blog post, or a comment to this blog post, or a comment on Facebook or Google+.

I have a photograph of my grandfather, Tom J. Johnston (1912-1973), sporting a beard. Supposedly, he grew it out for a beard growing contest for the Walnut Festival, a four-day event in late September held in Walnut Creek, California. This probably was in the last 1940s or early 1950s.


I have never seen my grandfather in a beard at all, so this was really a special event for him. No word if he won any part of the contest. However, he looks like a lumberjack in the photo. He was actually a carpenter, who worked on houses, and later worked in the maintenance department at the local junior college. He also liked to make his own furniture and our family owns several of the pieces he made.

He died in 1973 when I was nineteen. He hadn’t even retired yet. My grandmother went on to live another forty years.

Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family

Comments

  1. Janice M. SellersFebruary 10, 2018 at 11:54 PM

    Maybe there's something in the newspaper about the Walnut Festival and the beard-growing contest?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lisa S. GorrellFebruary 11, 2018 at 5:07 AM

      I'm thinking I should try to see if there is. The papers are a bit spotty in the 1940s.

      Delete
  2. Linda StufflebeanFebruary 11, 2018 at 10:02 AM

    I love his beard and his outfit. The hat made me think of Switzerland.

    ReplyDelete
  3. NancyFebruary 11, 2018 at 5:33 PM

    Yes, he does look like a lumberjack and the beard is great. I hope you can find a news article about the event, as someone above suggested. It's sad he died so young.

    ReplyDelete
  4. genealogylizgauffreauFebruary 12, 2018 at 3:28 PM

    He definitely looks like he's up to something with that impish smile!

    ReplyDelete

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