This is my great-great grandmother with her firstborn, Charles LaFayette Reeves ("Lafe"), who was born in 1862, placing the date of this portrait in the Civil War era.
Lydia Melissa Upham was born in upstate New York on Sept. 6, 1842. Apparently she was known as Melissa. In 1861 she married Walter Francis Reeves (known as "Frank") in Michigan. I am guessing it was shortly after this photo was taken that Frank enlisted in the Union Army.
The Reeves family migrated to Washington Territory in 1889. In a letter Melissa wrote back home to Michigan from Centralia, Washington in 1891 we learn she had been a victim of typhoid fever in 1888 and had never been the same since. I had heard one reason the family moved West was the hope the climate would be better for her health.
Melissa died at age 50, Sept. 25, 1892, in Centralia, Washington and is buried there in the Pioneer Cemetery.
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