The Faces
We Keep.

My grandmother was Ivana Sue Birdwell Anderson. Her portrait, seated at ease on the sofa, is where this story begins. It is a quiet choice rather than a grand one. That is exactly why I love it. She is not an entry in a genealogy database here. She is a person resting in an ordinary room, and her face invites me to stop and stay a little longer.

Her parents were Oides “Bill” Birdwell and Mabel Marzelle Pritchett. In our family they belong to the world of Papa Birdwell and Big Mama—the names I knew long before I began tracing our family history.

There are places where my knowledge is wonderfully specific and places where it is still incomplete. I want both to be visible. The photographs can tell us how someone looked on one day, but they cannot, by themselves, tell us everything that person carried.

The photographs sent me backward, from Ivana to her parents and then further into the Birdwell generations. Oides “Bill” Birdwell was the son of Joel Jackson Birdwell. Those names matter not because they fill a chart, but because each represents a household, habits, troubles, tenderness, and ordinary days that made the next generation possible.

I've spent years listening, remembering, studying, and piecing together the lives behind these photographs. Each new discovery brings me closer to the people whose stories shaped our family. The family stories about Papa and Big Mama deserve their own full treatment. This page is an invitation into that larger story, not a claim that every branch is settled.

Billy Guy Anderson—my Papa—played for the Los Angeles Rams and the Houston Oilers. While playing quarterback for the University of Tulsa, he threw the first touchdown pass in Astrodome history. Papa’s football story is one part of the family album I came across that day—not the whole album.

I want those achievements remembered. But on this particular Friday, the photographs kept drawing me back to Ivana, to the Birdwells, and to the many parts of a family’s life that never appeared on a scoreboard.

One discovery changed how I think about my grandmother: a handwritten school paper she wrote on hypnosis. Titled “Health Theme — Hypnosis,” it reflects her interest in hypnosis in the 1950s. Long before I began studying her life, she was studying the human mind.

She did something more ambitious than collect a few curiosities. She organized an outline and bibliography and explored the history of hypnotism, including figures associated with early theories of magnetism and suggestion. She drew on encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers from her era, bringing together ideas that demanded far more thought than a routine school assignment.

The breadth is what stays with me: suggestion, memory, post-hypnotic behavior, amnesia, regression, and the ways a person might experience or respond to suggestion. Her research also considered possible uses of hypnosis in surgery, dentistry, childbirth, and the relief of pain. She also considered wider questions about faith healing, crowds, childhood, and free will. I see in those choices a young woman willing to examine difficult ideas, not simply accept them.

I picture a young Birdwell woman in the 1950s assembling this research and testing ideas about consciousness, medicine, and human behavior. It is tempting to describe her as ahead of her time. I see the intelligence, curiosity, and ambition of a young woman who was thinking well beyond the boundaries people might have expected of her.

I have spent so much time looking at her face. This paper lets me encounter her mind. That is a different kind of restoration—and perhaps the more important one.