One Small Thread in the Tapestry of Life

I was born on Christmas Eve in 1904. My parents, Richard Ambrose Ketner, Jr. and Ethel Caroline Payne Ketner, welcomed me with love and surrounded me with love all their lives.

The event took place at 611 South L Street in Tacoma, Washington. I wasn't much interested in the place of my birth at the time but it was later pointed out to me, a little "salt-box" of a cottage set atop a high bank in what was then the outskirts of a young town. Later the property was graded down level with the street and a bank was built there.

My earliest memory--or maybe it's part memory and part feeling--was at my Grandparents Payne's house. They had a narrow two-and-a-half story house on South 9th near K Street which had a wooden stoop or porch on one side that was about four feet off the ground. There was a way to get under the porch from the dirt-floored basement. I remember going in under the porch, sitting there and watching the dust-motes dancing in the sun rays that came through the cracks in the porch floor.

I must have been two-and-a-half years old at the time. Aunt Vera had a snap-shot of herself and me on that porch taken about that time. I don't remember anything more about it--whether I was hiding there for some reason or whether it was a favorite place.

(from the notes of Merle Gilman Ketner Shoemaker)

Merle

Merle Gilamn Ketner
Age 8 about 1912
Tacoma, Washington

I began this journal as a place to share old photos and family history. I named it after my grandmother, Merle Gilman Ketner Shoemaker, who nurtured my love of genealogy.

When I look at this photo, I can see the person that Merle would become, the face that was to become so dear to me a half-center later. She remains with me now, over thirty years since I last saw or spoke with her--a part of me and the icon of a person I would like to be.

This journal is an act of love for this girl and the woman she would become.