I’ll try to finish up John DeSmit Sr.’s other grandchildren next week. Pioneer Cemetery turned out to be a bust, though, for his first wife Jennie, as well as for two of the babies of John and Jacoba that passed away. There are not too many places they could have been buried in those early days if the cemetery was in the City of Kalamazoo. There are other cemeteries in areas around Kalamazoo, but not in the city. I might be too stubborn, but I can’t imagine them using a cemetery that wasn’t in town when they lived next to downtown.
This week I wanted to share a newspaper article from Joel Reeves. I have photos of Mary DeKorn DeSmit, but I had never seen a photo of her husband, John DeSmit, Jr. But here he is in the newspaper! The photo is from 1915, although the article is from 1981.
The boy in the photo, Edwin Reeves, is John’s grandson. I love seeing actual work with the celery that Kalamazoo was known for. What a fabulous photo. Notice that written on it says that the Model A capacity was 750 pounds loaded with 150 lb of celery. According to the writing, that put the weight at over 1,125 pounds!
I hope too many heavy people didn’t get into those Model As at one time . . . .
The Family Kalamazoo 
That’s a great photo!
I was thrilled to see it! I wonder if the family still has the original photo that went to the newspaper.
Or if it was owned by the newspaper.
I am so thrilled you found this newspaper article. That is so cool. I am wondering if the paper itself might have some more archived photo’s you could tap in to.
Yes, I think they have many mentions (at least) of the DeSmits!
Somehow I “unfollowed” your blog—I don’t know if I clicked on something by mistake or WordPress decided to punish me. Great newspaper photo and story!
You think the WordPress gods are against us? Your comment doesn’t appear on my blog and they take your blog away from me? I would never have known except I was looking at something else and noticed that next to your name and blog, it said Follow instead of Following….
You know, I’m a little worried that this might have happened with others, too, because suddenly in the last couple of weeks there are other regular readers who have not been reading my blog. But how would I even find out something like that?
Look to see who your followers are through the People option on the admin menu. I noticed it when I was looking at a list of people who had liked one of my posts and saw that yours did not say Following. Weird.