Harold Rankin

I never knew my maternal grandfather, Harold Rankin, as he died a year before I was born. All I knew of him was that he was a photographer by trade and that he was loved by his family and respected by everyone who knew him. Which was everyone in his small town of Flora, Illinois.

I found the images presented here in a box of papers in the house of my grandmother, Bernadine Rankin, who still lives in Flora. I selected these images as they give both a picture of the man and a small slice of what life was like for a typical family during World War II.