100 years ago today, “Somewhere in France”

Exactly one hundred years ago today, my great-uncle William Alonzo Bailey (the boy in the header photo above) wrote the following letter home to his mother, Ellen Caroline (“Carrie”) Severson Bailey (the older woman in the header photo above).

Will was serving in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. The Dorothy he mentions is his sister, Dorothy Mary Bailey, from whom I inherited this and dozens of other letters from World War I. The Cambrai he refers to is the Battle of Cambrai in France at the end of November to early December 1917. Continue reading

The William Noble Bailey family

The photo that is the focus of this post is a charming family portrait, and one of the favorites in my collection. You might recognize it as the uncropped, unrotated image from which this site’s header image is derived.

The house is in the Olympia, Washington area. Since I’ll be heading up that area to do some family history research in late August–early September, I figured this would be a good time to post something about William N. Bailey and his family, some of my Olympia-area ancestors.

This post won’t go into much depth about the Bailey family, but I’d like to give you enough to that you know at least a little about everyone pictured in the photo. I’ll write more about the house itself in a later post.

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