One of the great mysteries of our family is my dad's father, Sidney Homer Babin. Sidney died in Chicago, it is alleged, sometime shortly after my father's birth, in 1925. At that point, my father was living with his maternal grandmother and two aunts on a farm in rural Wisconsin. Sidney's passing is "alleged" because Dad's mother, Maude, was an infamous twister of the truth, and in spite of hours of research, no death certificate for Sid has ever surfaced. There are virtually no details of Sidney's life that survive other than: he was from Louisiana, was 15 to 20 years older than Maude, and worked as a sign painter in Chicago where he supposedly was killed in a car accident. To keep the legend even more intriguing, only one known photo of Sidney was said to exist, an indistinct full-length shot, taken of him on a visit to the farm where my father was raised. This has been the only image I ever had of him. Yesterday, I came down to the last unopened cache o...
