Nina Lucretia Weaver Dodge

Good evening, Family Trails readers. As readers of this family blog, I am just curious…are you descendants of Nettie and C.S. Weaver?… Are you friends of the Weaver family?…. Or just interested in the ramblings of a family in search of its roots? Whatever your reason is for checking in this week, I am glad that you are here. This is a welcoming spot for anyone who finds our family or any of the topics in this blog interesting. If you have been reading along for the past year, you are familiar with the Weaver family…the family that we call the "roots" of this Family Trails blog.  We definitely dig deeper and beyond the story of Nettie and Charles Sisson Weaver, but for this week, let us meet and remember their ninth child, Nina Lucretia Weaver Weaver Dodge. Nina was the ninth of ten children. She is the smaller girl standing to the right of her mother in this picture below.

 As you have read before, I think this picture is stunning! Just think of it… a mother and father with their 10 children, dressed in their summer finest for an outdoor photograph in front of their house…the oldest sons looking very dashing, the oldest daughters very fashionable, the younger children so precious in their sailor tops and heirloom dresses. 

This photograph looks similar to photos taken of passengers on the Titanic or the members of Tzar Nicholas' family, the last royals of the Russian Empire…the clothing styles, the arrangements of the children, the sepia tones, the expressions on their faces. This is all enough to make one pause and think…this was a very remarkable time in history, and yet …this is our history. This photograph was taken of Our family in Talladgea, Alabama, the fastest growing city in Alabama at the time. The family members in this photograph are Our parents, Our grandparents, Our great-grandparents…

When we stop to think like this, it was not that long ago. 

In this picture,  four year old Nina is standing next to her mother, looking to her right. 

Nina is standing in this picture in the green dress. 

Aunt Nina was a school teacher at the now Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. She was a good cook too! Any time her family and friends came to visit, she and her sister, Lora, baked home-made treats to serve their company. Nina continued as a teacher to her extended family long after her retirement from school. She indulged her extended family with educational gifts at Christmas and on birthdays. 

We have written about Clairmont Springs many times in our family blog. When I think about Clairmont Springs, I, of course,  think about Aunt Nina. She loved going to Clairmont. She and Tee received so much joy having children spend time there. Nina and Tee drove us all down narrow country roads to find wild blackberries, then they baked deep-dish blackberry cobblers for us. Nina and Tee took us to neighboring farms to meet the farmers and their wives. We helped milk a cow, and we watched as the farmer's wife strained the warm milk before she churned it. The farmer allowed us to gather eggs from his chickens and his quails. Aunt Nina and Tee knew that learning how other people lived was part of having a good education. 

Then back to Clairmont Springs for swimming and catching frogs...These ladies never got tired!

Family Trials is honored to remember Nina Lucretia Weaver Dodge during her birthday month of September. 

Love,

Mariellan