GREENVILLE, S.C. — When Shawn Pope learned he was going to be a grandfather for the first time, his reaction was entirely normal. For his family, anyway. Rather than scurrying around buying baby booties or a tiny baseball mitt, the Marietta resident urged his pregnant daughter, Erica Yelton: “We have to take the photo.”
His excitement was understandable. It had been nearly 80 years since Pope’s family could boast of having five living generations who shared the same direct bloodline in a photo together.
And boast of it the original clan had: Their so-called “five generations” photo — the centerpiece of which was 3-month-old Jack Pope (Shawn’s father) plopped on the lap of his Brillo-whiskered great-great-grandfather, John T. Barron — had been prominently featured in a 1933 issue of the Sunday Atlanta Constitution.
So recently, the newly minted version of the five-generation family gathered at the white-columned Augusta Manor here to re-create the old photo. A beaming Erica Yelton, 30, sat where the baby’s mother had the first time around. That “baby,” the now 78-year-old Jack Pope, knelt where his own great-grandfather once had.
His elegantly coiffed mother, Frances Pope Tarr, 96, had moved over to claim the center spot formerly occupied by John T. Barron. In her lap, 7-week-old Avery Yelton gurgled and appeared blissfully unaware of the lovely fuss she’d managed to stir up simply by showing up.
“She’s why it’s happening all over again,” Jack Pope, of Royston, Ga., said of Avery, his great-granddaughter. “If she asked my advice, I’d tell her to keep her mouth shut and just smile for the camera.”
Twice in a century
It was an awfully matter-of-fact approach to a situation that’s anything but that. In an era when the instant gratification of Twitter posts and blog updates rules, one family had patiently awaited its chance to reconnect with a past embodied by an undated black-and-white photo clipped from some long-ago newspaper.
Perhaps more remarkable, meanwhile, is what this one family has managed to accomplish not once, but twice.
Experts say it’s not unheard of for families to have five living generations along the same bloodline — i.e. no sneaking in a great-uncle here or a sister’s kid’s kid there to help round out the set. Yet exactly how unheard of is anybody’s guess: The Census Bureau only collects information on multi-generational families living in the same household.
In fact, five generations may be becoming more commonplace as people tend to live longer.
“It was much less likely in the past when life expectancy at birth was much lower,” surmised Carl Haub, senior demographer for the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. Since Social Security was enacted in 1935, Americans’ average life expectancy has risen by 13 years, and medical advances have significantly reduced infant and child mortality rates.
OK, so there’s a (somewhat) logical explanation for five living generations happening once in a family. But twice? Within 80 years?
“It sounds a little fantastic,” Haub concurred.
“I have never heard of a family having two sets in the same direct line,” Vivian Price Saffold, newsletter editor for the Georgia Genealogical Society, wrote in an e-mail. “Having some of the same people in both sets is really special.”
Knack for making news
So is having two such similarly unique photos taken over three-quarters of a century apart — even if the circumstances surrounding the earlier one are a bit hazy. Jack Pope, of course, was too young to know what was happening back then; nearly 80 years later, his mother remembers being in the photo, but not when or where it was taken.
“My grandfather wanted to have it done. He took care of it,” Tarr said as she prepared to pose with her younger family members on the circa-1865 manor house’s front veranda. “He ran a shoe store downtown in Atlanta for years.”
That fellow, J. Riley Barron, had a knack for racking up headline-worthy personal milestones. The Hapeville resident turned up again in the pages of the Constitution on the occasion of his 50th wedding anniversary. The August 1943 story also included quotes from the 95-year-old Methodist minister who’d performed that long-ago ceremony and was still very much alive himself.
Says one of Riley’s grandsons now about why the “five generations” photo might have come about:
“His shoe shop was the biggest one in Atlanta and he was a pretty well-known guy,” said Charles Miller, 66, whose uncle, William Oslin Barron, was Frances Pope Tarr’s father. “I’m going to say Riley was well known enough that [the picture] showed up in the paper.”
So that’s the why — maybe. The when isn’t any easier to pin down.
Mystery date solved
While Yelton and other present-day family members cherish their framed copies of the original “five generations” photo, none could say for sure when it appeared in the newspaper. All that remained after so many years was the picture itself, probably clipped from the page where it first appeared, the undated caption attached to the back.
They’re almost positive that the photo must have been taken in or around April 1932. Jack Pope appears to be about 3 months old in it; a “Grady Baby,” he was born in Atlanta’s landmark hospital in January 1932.
Yet the photo didn’t run in the Sunday Constitution’s “Gravure Pictorial Section” until Aug. 13, 1933.
“That baby’s not a year-and-a-half old,” Pope scoffed with all the authority of an ex-Marine who’s always known exactly what he looked like at every age.
In the early 1930s, a staffer named Sandy Sanders shot hundreds of photos that ran in the Constitution: The Atlanta Police Band serenading New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt during a stopover on his way to Warm Springs. “Miss Health” guzzling milk at Agnes Scott College. Live rabbits being given away at the Junior League Marionette Show.
At some point, too, Sanders snapped the Barron family photo that ran on the Sunday “Gravure” page. Introduced in 1919 — possibly as “an added feature spurred on by the popularity of some of the photojournalism associated with World War I,” said Paul Crater, vice president of research services at the Atlanta History Center — this once-a-week supplement included higher quality photos that tended to be more feature-ish than news-oriented, and contained items of interest from around the country.
On Aug. 13, 1933, the “five generations” photo shared space with shots of movie stars Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler on the set of “Tugboat Annie,” a “Mayonnaise Kitchen” display at a Chicago trade exposition and even an early version of real estate “porn” (an architect’s drawing of a house under construction on Peachtree Battle Avenue). Maybe someone had held onto it until the exact right day and mix of images came along. Or maybe it just took the photo that much longer to wend its way through the newspaper’s more complicated rotogravure production process.
A moment out of time
Whatever occurred back in 1932 and 1933, taking the 2010 version of the “five generations” photo proved relatively easy. Yelton, a Greenville pharmacist, did much of the organizing.
“She’s a go-getter,” Jack Pope said admiringly of his granddaughter, who, not surprisingly, was a University of Georgia cheerleader after graduating from Cobb County’s Sprayberry High School.
Not long before noon on a sunny Sunday, a caravan of vehicles pulled up to Augusta Manor from Erica and Travis Yeltons’ nearby home. Out popped the young family, along with the Georgia contingent: Tarr, Jack Pope and his wife, Carol, who all live in Royston, and little Avery’s proud grandparents, Shawn and Joy Pope from Marietta.
The whole process — from the time the five participants carefully arranged themselves to when Greenville-based photographer Jen Rogers finished capturing their images with a Canon 5D digital camera — took less than half an hour. Rogers shot in color, then converted the images to black and white and e-mailed Yelton a link where she could view them.
In some ways, though, what happened here felt even more remarkable in an age when families break down or are reformatted as often and ruthlessly as Facebook pages. Much had changed over nearly 80 years, but the desire to celebrate a uniquely durable lineage in a place far beyond the reach of the “delete” key remained intact.
The five living generations who assembled for Rogers’ lens formed an irresistible picture of an enduring American family:
Jack Pope, the former Marine who served on the USS Missouri, and his son, Shawn, a longtime employee of the auto industry, knelt on either side of a small bench. Erica Yelton, the new mom, sat between them. And in the middle of it all sat Tarr, who’d once drilled aircraft wings on a World War II assembly line, the new baby nestled in her arms.
“She called me and said, ‘Guess who’s coming to our house?’ ” Tarr recalled about the day Yelton told her she was going to be a great-great-grandmother. “Now here we all are. It’s history.”
