52 Ancestors: Week 4: "A Theory in Progress" - Nanny at the Beach

I don't know if it is so much a theory, really, as it is a "Project in Progress."

In 2023, my paternal grandmother, Clare Henry-Earle, the last of my grandparents, passed away at the age of 94; we all called her Nanny. Two years later, in late 2025, my aunts have put my grandparents’ house on the market.

I believe my grandfather purchased the house shortly after returning from military service in WWII. He was honorably discharged on March 25, 1946. Do the math and that is about 80 years that the house has been in the possession of my family. 

The home, pictured below, was constructed in 1942 but I am not aware of anyone else owning the property between the time of its construction and my grandfather’s purchase. I think the Earles have always owned it.

That yellow sided house on the right? That is where my mother grew up.

Anyway, I tell you all this because the sale of the house came with quite a bit of unloading. When a family sells a house after eight decades, it isn’t just a move, it’s an excavation. Eighty years in one place accumulates a lot of life. During the clean-out, my uncle gave me several of my grandmother’s scrapbooks from her youth. 

Nanny promised me her family photos because of my love for family history, but when I opened the albums, I found something else unexpected. The pages were filled with faces I didn’t recognize, teenagers, mostly. Nanny’s high school friends. Some were labeled. Most were not. Although I wish I had gotten family photos, my first thought looking at these was simple: Someone out there, who knows these people, and would love to have these photos too, just as much as I do. 

So I started with the names I had found noted on the back of a few of the photos.

The first person I searched for was Dotty. 

Here is Dot hoisting my little grandmother up on her shoulder, clearly at the beach, and distinguishably Jones Beach circa 1945.

I found Dotty pretty quickly, alive and well, still on Long Island. Through social media, I connected with her children. Dotty is visually impaired and couldn’t help me identify most of the people in the photos, but she did point me to her younger brother, Ed.

My uncle and I had the great opportunity to sit down with Ed and his family and go through the albums together. As we turned the pages, Ed brought the photos to life, naming faces, sharing stories, and painting a picture of what it was like growing up in Uniondale in the 1940s. At one point, he even mentioned that my grandfather had planned to buy Ed’s childhood home, but circumstances were such that it just didn't pan out.

One person Ed spoke about at length was Billy from Chaminade, a local Catholic high school. Billy became my next mission.

Billy has passed away, but I was able to connect with his family. When I shared a photo, his daughter immediately said, “That’s Uncle Stan.” Uncle Stan wasn’t a biological uncle, but a beloved high school friend of her father’s.

That sent me back to the albums. I searched for more photos of Billy and Stan, and to my delight, there was a duplicate of the image and on the back it was labeled. “Uncle Stan” turned out to be the grandfather of one of my sister’s best friends, Jenny O.

We already knew that Nanny and Stan had gone to high school together. I think we learned that around the time that my sister got married; Jenny was one of my sister's bridesmaids. What I didn’t know was that Nanny and Stan had been part of the same close-knit circle of friends, pictured below.

My grandma is the girl kneeling on the right. Billy is the guy kneeling in the middle. Stan is the guy standing on the left with his arm around the girl on the far left.

Now if only I could find descendants of the others - Gloria Newton, Joan Santa Maria, Claude Armand, Joe Willis, Joyce Santa Maria, Ed Peters, and Ed Heinlein. I'm looking for you! Each would have been born in the late 1920s, early 1930s and gone to school in and around Hempstead, NY. 

I know that other people might flip past those faces that aren't "mine" but these aren’t just my grandmother’s lost memories, these were people who at one time mattered deeply to her. Now I feel responsible for these images. I want to share them with the people who would appreciate them. 

Maybe one day I will find each of their families and string them all back together. Maybe we could even gather and recreate the photo at the spot where these teenager's once stood at Jones Beach. I think that would be just as fun as the joy these kids seem to be sharing back in 1945.