So what was all the buzz about?

Photos, photos, photos! The Amish do not, for the most part, agree with having close up photos taken of them. So photos of Amish relatives are few and far between. Sometimes taken and then torn up.

One of Aunt P.’s daughters had prepared, for the auction, two collages of photos of different family members. She had put together as well a packet of unmounted photos, which included all from the collages plus some others. Some of these photos had probably never been seen by anyone except Aunt P.’s family. There were some of both Lizzie Miller and Jonas Hostetler (our subject ancestors), and even one of Jonas’s father, Abraham. There were photos of “English” family members as well, but even those had not necessarily been widely distributed. I saw some of our family I don’t think I’d seen before.

So when I came out of the kitchen after visiting with an aunt I hadn’t seen in a l-o-n-g time, there were three groups gathered, pointing at something, oohing and aahing, guessing sometimes at who was in the photo.

Oh, this was definitely going to be interesting!

My sister and I decided we would go for the packet of photos in the auction. And as I said yesterday, I wasn’t even there for the bidding! But it was spirited. We didn’t get the packet, so we bid on the framed collage that was left. Didn’t get that either. One uncle got the two sets within frames. A cousin got the packet of photos. And these three items accounted for about a third of the total money gathered for the funding of the reunion. Good idea, E.! And lots of fun.

Probably there were not any Amish family members who bid on the photos, but they were definitely interested in them. If they had bid, I really can’t imagine how high the prices would have gone. A cousin on the Hershberger side told me about an auction of her mother’s things after her mother’s death. She herself badly wanted an oil lamp that her father had given her mother while they were dating. She herself bid up to more than $600, and it went for over $700! Better bring your checkbook when you attend these auctions!