“The idea here is family I didn’t know. This is a photo of my mother, Laura Belle Coleman, and her family in 1917. While I knew her brothers and sister, I never knew her mother and father. So she would tell me stories about her growing up. The one I remember most is about the 1917 tornado that hit their farm at Midway near Rocheport, Missouri. My mom was deathly ill with scarlet fever and couldn’t be moved to the root cellar with the rest of the family. Her dad, Bob, stayed with her during the storm. The story is that the tornado picked up straw and drove it into fence posts. She survived along with the story.” – Bob Baumgartner

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Header image: map of Northeast Houston in 1922, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.