What even are children?

[bcholmes]

Dear friends who have children, or spend a lot of time in their presence (without cowering in fear, like I do): I’m looking for some help identifying the age of these kids. How old do you think the kids are in this picture?

I know who the three older kids are, but I’m trying to identify the baby. It’s either my father, or my father’s older sister, Elizabeth, who died as an infant. If it’s the latter, then this might be the only picture of her that I know of.

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

Is there more than a year between your father and Elizabeth? I'd guess the toddler at two or almost, the oldest at five, and the younger boy at three or four, but I wouldn't put money on any of it. That baby is maybe three months. Do you think this might be a death photo?

[bcholmes]

I think this picture was taken in the spring/summer of 1944. Elizabeth died at just over two months old on July 14th, 1944. My father shows up at the beginning of 1946.

If the date is correct, the oldest boy would be five and a half, the younger boy would be four and a half and the toddler would be about 18-20 months.

I don't know what a death photo is. What's that?

[boxofdelights]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_photography

A family photo with the recently deceased. People do still do it with babies. There's a Polaroid of me holding my first, who was stillborn, in a filing cabinet in my husband's house. The nurses had suggested going home and getting a camera, and when we kept saying no, they took one. They said we might want it later and in fact we did, in that very odd state in which I had had a baby but did not have a baby. I didn't make copies and send them to my relatives, but I did take it out a few times for a reality check.

[sedge]

Toddler looks 18 months to me. Neither of the boys looks older than four.

The toddler is definitely not older than two, though.

[bcholmes]

That does seem to suggest that the baby is Elizabeth. The toddler would be 18-20 months if that's true.

[jmthane]

I'm with sedge and boxofdelights - the toddler is no more than 2, and 18-20 months seems reasonable; and the two boys look about 4. (I see lots of kids coming through the checkout lane at Walmart, where I'm currently supplementing my student loan income.) Another clue might (but only "might") be the dog in the background. Was the dog still around in 1946, do you know? If so, not much of a clue there. If not, however, ... :-)

Who they are...

[(Anonymous)]

The oldest boy is Ralph, beside him is Ronnie, the girl in front of them is Vivian (my mother, born 1942) the baby would be Elizabeth...she passed away at 18 months from a strep infection. She died in the car on the way to the hospital.