Finding family

Our  magnificent lake is practically overhead. What curious geography. A lake in the sky.

Mary Hogan, The Woman in the Photo

In The Woman in the Photo (2016), Mary Hogan weaves three stories into one. These three threads include Lee, a contemporary California woman who has long known she was adopted as a baby but knows nothing about her birth parents. On her 18th birthday she is given a glimpse at an old photograph that shows two women, one of whom may be her ancestor. This starts her on a quest to discover what she can about the women in that photo.

Another thread, and for much of the novel the main thread, is Elizabeth Haberlin, a spoiled rich girl from Pittsburgh who is the daughter of the personal physician to that city's wealthiest families. In 1889 she is about the same age as Lee is now and about to make her debut, when she is expected to have her pick of some of the wealthiest young men in western Pennsylvania. And there is even a handsome young Englishman who is charmed by her.

The third woman — the third thread — is none other than Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross.

What brings these three together in one story is one of the great American tragedies, the Johnstown Flood, which tore so many families apart. Elizabeth is one of the privileged few who spends summers at the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in the mountains above Johnstown, Pa. For their pleasure, a mountain stream has been dammed to create an artificial lake just outside their mansion-like cottages. When heavy rains cause that dam to give way, a tidal wave of water pours over Johnstown, killing more than 2,200 people.

The flood brings Clara Barton to Johnstown. And when Lee finally identifies her in that photo, she is on her way to identifying that other woman and, in time, find a family she didn't know she had, right there in Johnstown. Meanwhile two of the three women find true love, poor Clara remaining a spinster. How all this happens makes a good story, even if it sometimes seems a little too neat and Hogan's language at times inflated. Yet this latter fault might be excused by the fact that part of the story has a 19th century narrator, a time when inflated language was customary.