I came across Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post for this week. His challenge? Share “one or more photographs of females in your ancestral families that have beautiful hair, by your own subjective beauty standards.”

Several photos came immediately to mind. But here’s the one I decided to share.

This beautiful young lady is my mother’s paternal aunt, known to all of us in the family as Aunt Zetta.

She was the first of five children born to my great grandparents David Lyman Blacker and Ada Cordelia (Buchenau) Blacker. Born on September 7, 1873, in Radersburg, Montana Territory, she lived to be 101 years old.

I find this photograph to be endlessly fascinating to look at. The charming dress and various pieces of jewelry. The black lace parasol. Her hands . . . her lovely face . . . and of course her beautiful hair. Her relaxed, confident pose certainly seems more like that of a young woman.

But in the end, it’s the focused gaze of her eyes that I find the most fascinating.

Although Aunt Zetta never married, and never had any children of her own, she was most assuredly the matriarch of her generation. Perhaps she somehow sensed that would be her role, even at a young age.