The Way We Were in the 1890’s 

This photograph is of the four children of Simon, a grocer, and Regina (nee Spiro) Sunshine.   The boys, Benjamin, Alvin, and Walter, were born around 1882, 1885, and 1889 (at least two of them in Tennessee), while their sister Gladys didn’t arrive until 1893 or 1894, so this photograph appears to have been taken no later than 1895 or 1896.  

Simon, who died here in 1922, and Regina are buried in the Knoxville’s Old Jewish Cemetery near son Alvin, who died in 1907.  Regina moved to Detroit where her surviving children had settled, and died there in 1933.  Gladys applied for a late-filed Knoxville birth certificate in 1954. Knoxvillians Fannie Beiler, identified as a cousin, and Louis Lippner filed affidavits in support of her application claiming they knew the circumstances of her birth.  The document includes the post office box of E B Deitch.

To learn more, visit our website at jewishknoxville.org/archives.  If you know more about the Sunshine family, or whether Regina’s father Wolf Spiro was related to Herman Spiro, on whose vinegar barrels the early members of Temple Beth El met, please contact the archivist at archives@jewishknoxville.org or call (865) 690-6343.

We only have photographs such as this one because someone saved it, and someone thought to donate it to the archives.  This is certainly one of the Archives’s oldest photographs.

Send your photos of “The Way We Were” to archives@jewishknoxville.org.