I found some cool photo's of my mother as a child up through her young adult years and thought it would be a good tribute to her life. What I like about these photos is they show how vital and active she was. By 
the time I was born she became a typical parent trying to balance work and a family with two small boys. Now that I'm the same age as she was when she died, and we have 11 year old twins, I realize she was just tired like most parents.
The first photo is probably one of the earliest I have of her. She's standing with her arm around her little brother (Franklin E. Zaring Jr.). I don't know the exact date of the picture, but she appears about 6 or 7 years old so the year was approximately 1926-1927. It's probably somewhere in the Denver area because of the flat paved road on the left and the cement sidewalk on the right. I love the car in the background.
The second photo appears to be my mother's high school graduation day in 1937 - she's the young woman on the right. I have a lot of photos of my mother during her high school years at Saint Francis De Sales - this 
was a Catholic school. Some of these photos will be highlighted in upcoming "Who Are These People?" posts - many of are of unidentified boys. I love this photo because the smile you see here is the one I remember when I was growing up - she was a very warm and affectionate woman and I think this photo shows it.
The next two pictures of her skiing are cool. I love the group photo on a ski slope with her friends. My mother is the short one who's the 5th person from the left. With the 
exception of the clothes and hairstyle, she looks like the typical ski bum you see in the Colorado mountains today. For some reason, she stopped skiing after my brother and I were born. I don't know if she got hurt when she was younger, but she still encouraged my brother and I to ski and we started at a young age. An interesting note on the skis she is using in both photos...we 
still have those skis and poles. I remember playing with them when I was a kid and my brother has them mounted on a wall in his house.
This last photo is one of my mother either shortly before she married my father or shortly after - meaning me and my brother are only a few years away. She's standing at the gate of the Kenosha Trout Club up in the mountains in Park County, Colorado. This was a members only club where the well-to-do had cabins and an big private lake to fish in. My grandparents were the caretakers of this club and were given a place to live - the stone building behind my mother was their house. I 
spent many fun summers and Christmas vacations at this place.
I have many other photos of my mother and letters from her scrapbook that I will eventually process and post, but I love these because they show her as a young, attractive, and very active woman. I've actually learned more about my mother after she died (I was 14 at the time), through my genealogy efforts, than I learned when she was alive. You know what? The more I learn about her the more proud I am of her being my mother - Happy Mother's Day, Mom!
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