I think I have to welcome summer to Tucson since the weather is pushing 100 degrees again even though it’s not quite mid-May.

It’s also time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver and here’s the challenge:

1)  What automobile models did your ancestors have?  Pick an ancestor and share something about their cars.

I know my great grandmother owned a car, but I have no idea what make and model it was, so I’ll have to go with my maternal grandparents, Vernon and Hazel Adams.

When my grandfather was just starting his work career, he and his Uncle Perce Chadwick, were set up in the auto sales business by his mother, Annie (Stuart) Adams.

That business didn’t go too well because they were selling Columbias, a company of which I’ve never heard.

His cousin Charles shared the details in a letter in the 1980s:

When your grandfather graduated (NOTE: from Bliss Electrical School), he went back to Calais with no particular goal in mind. Annie, his mother, always the activist, set him up in the automobile business. She got my father (NOTE: Charles’s father, Perce Chadwick) to go in with him – the idea being that my father would handle sales and Vernon would handle the service end of the business. Unfortunately, by then, the well known makers had already awarded their local dealerships, and all they were able to get was the Columbia car – a make, which (mercifully) is now forgotten. It was a real dog, if the description I have heard of it is to be believed. In any even, the company went bankrupt [Note: 1924] shortly after my father and Vernon did!

In 1955, my grandparents owned this 1955 Buick, photo taken at their camp at Little Sebago Lake, Maine. Grandfather is holding me!

I don’t know when Grandfather decided to go with Cadillacs, but, by the 1960s, my grandparents switched to Cadillacs. I remember being quite amazed because they bought a new one every two years. However, they all looked the same to me!

Grandfather died in 1968 and Grandmother survived him by 27 Years. She gave up driving in her 80s, but up to that time, she continued the Cadillac tradition.

Thanks, Lisa and Randy, for a fun challenge this week.