Family History Surprises

It really is always surprising when you experience a Family History surprise. I've been going along with my searching and linking of families for over 30 years now but quite regularly I get these surprises which give extra information or documents which provide further insight into members of the Hookins family. The latest surprise was a visit from Debbie who is on the same Family Tree as me and had been given a number of photographs none of which were marked to indicate the subjects involved. I have now accumulated records of over 1500 Hookins people and acquired quite a number of photographs which I have been gradually sharing on this blog so I was quietly confident of being able to identify some of these. That illusion was shattered however when I looked through them and was able to identify 2 people who appeared in one of the photographs!! So - what do I know after all these years?!! Debbie was able to tell me where her father appeared but we are still left with 14 prints involving a number of people unkown to us so I have set about the task of sending them to people in our Family Tree who might just have been around at the same time as these people and/or may have seen pictures of them to identify some. Debbie's father was a William Ewart HOOKINS son of Henry James HOOKINS and it is probably Henry's siblings (there were 10 of them!!) or people of his generation whom we are looking at. Those siblings were Frederick John (my grandfather), Samuel, Ada Jane (married name RODBER), Alice (married name ROBERTS), Jesse (died at age 6), Walter, Charles, William, Nellie and Elizabeth (died at age 12). If anyone has knowledge of the families of any of these or of contact with them I would be delighted to hear from them. In the meantime I will continue to contact those I have come to know over the years to try and help solve this mystery. One thing with these surprises is that it normally involves a bit of work to solve mysteries or to catalogue changes but it's enjoyable all the same and such contact is very welcome. So thanks to Debbie - it was good to meet up again and I hope to get some answers for both of us. And here are the pictures.