A Horsey Ancestor?

My husband loves genealogy as much as I love horses. He knows more about horses than most people do because he loves me, and I know more about genealogy because I love him. We can't help but rub off on each other!

Recently while working on my father's line, Craig connected with a distant relation of mine who shared some old family photos, including this one of my Great Uncle Joe, my grandmother's older brother.

I never met this great uncle, but I knew of him and that he was from St. Louis and drove a delivery cart in the early part of the twentieth century.

After the initial excitement of seeing a photo of my great uncle, my attention zeroed in on the horses. "How lucky!" I thought. "He got to work with horses daily!" And then I remembered that, for people who lived at that time, horses were a necessary fact of life, a way of living, and not the treat that they are for horse lovers like me now.

That led me to wonder, "Did they have horse lovers like me back then since horses were so ubiquitous?"  I answered my own question right away - IndyCar racing had popped into my mind. (I am a girl from Indiana, after all! )

The Indianapolis 500 has been held in Indiana for over 100 years. The drivers, mechanics, owners, and fans are crazy about cars well beyond their transportation function. So are those who follow NASCAR - they love cars over and beyond what most of us feel for the car sitting in the garage or driveway.  Just like we have our NASCAR and IndyCar lovers now, no doubt there were avid horse enthusiasts back then, too.

I found that thought comforting for some odd reason. I liked knowing that there have been others like me across the years who lived and breathed horses, loving them beyond their function as aids to human life, loving them simply because they ARE.

Uncle Joe, I hope that you, too, found joy in your daily association with horses, including these two lovely ones. And perhaps you and I even share the same family horsey gene.