I have several favorite photos which I have already included in past blog posts. However, I have been blessed with many, many family photos so there are still a few others in the collection that are favorites.

While I have several photos of each of my grandparents as adults, I only have childhood photos of my maternal grandfather, Vernon Tarbox Adams; I am lucky enough to have one of him as an infant and several of him as a young school-age boy.

Vernon was born on 3 May 1899 in Calais, Maine, the only child of Charles E. Adams and Annie Maude Stuart. He was well-loved and perhaps was taken for a photograph around the time of his first birthday:

Vernon T. Adams, Born 1899
Inscribed by Hazel Coleman Adams

Some adults seem to look nothing like themselves at much younger ages. However, Grandfather had the same smile and twinkle in his eyes during my lifetime. His ears also remained the same! He just looks so happy in this picture. If my grandmother hadn’t already identified the subject of this photo, I would have said it was of Grandfather. With a smile like that, either the photographer or his parents did a great job of keeping him engaged.

Here he is as a young man with his parents:

Vernon with Charles and Annie

Although he isn’t smiling here, his head is angled in the same direction. The shape of his face is the same with a somewhat high forehead and the ears are a dead match.

His obituary featured an excellent likeness of him much later in life, smiling:

Vernon’s Obituary

Grandfather died much too young, only 69 years old, on Pearl Harbor Day, 7 December 1968 in Boston, Massachusetts of Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease. At the time, he was only the third known case to be diagnosed in the 20th century. A couple of decades later, a variation of CJD became known as Mad Cow Disease.