This is a picture of Mom (Jean Graham Barnett) & Dad (John Addison Alexander, a.k.a. Jack) taken for the church directory.  I don't really know the time frame, but I would guess 1980s or 1990s.  This is the story of how my parents met. 

My mother lived in Richmond, Virginia; and when she was about 17, she was spending a lot of time with a sailor who was in his 20s.  My grandmother (Gracie Van Pelt Barnett) did not think too highly of this and must have said something about it to her sister (Jessie Van Pelt Lipscomb).  So Jessie offered to take Jean and her sister Ruth to the Shenandoah Valley to get a change of scenery. 

Jessie's sister-in-law was Bruce Alexander Lipscomb (Bruce was married to Jessie's husband's brother, Wiley).  Bruce had a sister-in-law (her brother's widow) who ran a tourist home in the Shenandoah Valley just outside Fairfield, Virginia.  So Aunt Jessie took Ruth & Jean to the tourist home in Fairfield. 

The owner/operator of the tourist home, which was really a farm house located on Route 11, was Janet Fultz Alexander.  She lived there with her mother, and they ran the tourist home as well as the farm. It was basically an early version of a bed & breakfast.

At some point after my mother arrived at the tourist home, one of Janet's sons came home.  I'm not sure where he had been, but I remember hearing that a bus stopped at the driveway and dropped him off.  He was about the same age as the two young women, and he offered to drive the "city girls" around the county and show them the sights. After they returned to Richmond, Mom & Ruth both wrote letters thanking him for showing them the sights.  That young man was my future Dad, Jack Alexander.

I always thought these events were ironic because my grandmother sent Mom out of town to get her away from one guy & she ended up meeting the one she would marry!

Mom later told me that Dad told her that when he stepped off of  the bus and saw her, he thought she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen.  Years ago, we found a brown lunch bag in my Uncle Jim's attic (a.k.a. the tourist home attic) that contained the two letters from Ruth & Mom.  I still have them.

The bottom line of all this is that the two sides of my family know each other more closely than most  families who did not come from the same community.  Whenever we had weddings or funerals on one side of the family, it was not unusual to see members of the other side of the family attend.  This was largely due to the Aunt Jessie connection.  It seemed like she was everybody's Aunt Jessie! And now you understand why I credit her with my parents meeting each other.