This is the best portrait of Elmer & Ruth’s family that we have. Unfortunately it is incomplete; the fourth boy, Howard, was not yet born when this picture was taken.
The girl at the top of the photo is Vera, the eldest child. On the second row are Clayton and Vernon, looking very much like the businessmen they would become. Ruth and Elmer are in the third row down, and Harold is again front and center.
If Harold was three years old at the time of this photo, it would have been taken in 1906, probably in Los Angeles.
This picture was taken at a photographer’s studio in Los Angeles at about the same time as the photo above it. The boys are Vernon (the oldest) on the left; Clayton, already a little taller than his brother, on the right; and Harold, the youngest, front and center. Harold (my grandfather) was born on 1903, and he looks to be about 3 years old in this picture.
Merritt Votaw did not like farming, and in Iowa where he grew up there were not many alternatives. As a boy he had seen a postcard with a picture of the 1890 Rose Parade in Pasadena, and vowed that someday he would live in California. Here, he writes about his first trip to Whittier, in 1901, with his brother Elmer and family. The trip was influential for them, as they both later became residents of Whittier.
We made a trip to Long Beach and the agents sure tried to sell us some lots. They told us the population of Long Beach was five hundred and it would not make a big town. We stayed in Whittier three days on Olive Drive with a Quaker family by the name of Luther Kenworthy, who had an interest in the hardware store… I remember attending the Friends Church at the corner of College and Comstock. I decided that some day my home would be in Whittier.
Scanned from Merritt Votaw’s book, this picture of Elmer and Ruth Votaw was taken in 1916.
Other than his business dealings, we don’t have a lot of information about Elmer’s life. In his Votaw family history book, Merritt Votaw (Elmer’s younger brother) tells us something about him, starting back when the brothers worked on their father’s farm in Iowa.
Of the five brothers [Elmer] was the strongest and could do as much work as our father. Each fall the farmers would find out who could husk the most corn in ten hours. We had a field of large white corn, and Elmer worked for ten hours and ten minutes, taking only ten minutes for lunch. My father and Oscar hauled it to the scales in Wright and sold it. When the weights were added up next day they found that Elmer had husked one hundred sixteen and a half bushels of corn which made him the winner that fall.
The next story is about Elmer’s wedding, which took place in 1891.
Elmer was married to Ruth Ann Smith (the prettiest bride I had ever seen) on New Year’s Eve of 1891. She did not have a large house so the wedding was held at our house near Wright, Iowa. It had rained all day and the roads had never been graveled. The mud was about hub deep and by morning the roads were frozen like rocks. My father had to put boards under all the buggy and wagon wheels so they would not be frozen in the ground. William P. Sopher, the minister, came quite late and the bus load of young people that came from Penn College had to stay all night and return by train the next day. They played games all night and drank many gallons of milk that my mother brought up from the cellar. About 1 a.m. I went upstairs and found five people sleeping across my bed–Smith Kenworthy, his wife, Nettie (a sister of the bride) and their children, Alma, Elda, and Carl.
Here is a picture of all five siblings as young adults, along with two of their spouses and two children. By the date of this picture both Elmer and Ruth had passed on. Left to right: Howard Votaw, Will Boyce, Vera Votaw Boyce, Clayton Votaw, Lucile Votaw (Vernon’s wife), Harold Votaw, and Vernon Votaw. The two children in front, who are apparently reenacting a wild west show, belong to Will and Vera Boyce. Their names are Dillard and Dudley.
This picture dates from the early to mid-1920s. The couple on the left are unknown, but the man in the bow tie is my grandfather Harold. Moving to the right of him, we see Alma and Clayton Votaw, then Lucile and Vernon Votaw. I don’t know what was the deal with Vernon’s finger.
A few (maybe 10) years later, the five siblings arranged themselves in height order in what appears to be Clayton’s grove of orange trees in Orange County, California. (The photographer tipped the camera a little bit to exaggerate the height order.) From left to right: Howard, Clayton, Harold, Vera, and Vernon.
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