Family Pictures USA

- [Thomas] If this image were in a museum, no one would doubt its importance to our shared history.

But history isn't just the artifacts in institutions, [camera shutter clicking] it's also the precious objects we hold in our hands and hearts, the ordinary family photos that people create every day.

- This is Family Pictures... - Family Pictures... - Family Pictures USA, action.

[jazzy music] - [Thomas] I'm Thomas Allen Harris.

Filmmaker, photographer, and host of Family Pictures USA.

We're traveling the country, inviting everyone to share their family photos, revealing a new history of our community, our country, and ourselves.

[jazzy music] Once you see America through family pictures, you'll never see this country the same way again.

[jazzy music] [upbeat guitar music] - [Thomas] This is Florida's paradise coast.

From Fort Myers to the Everglades, the Southwestern edge of our southernmost state.

[upbeat music] Finding paradise with dolphins in Southwest Florida.

Where paradise is fishing, farming, cattle, and community.

This is the first three months in the United States.

These images.

People with big dreams see endless possibilities.

- [Female] This photo gives me strength.

I'm living in one of the most beautiful cities in America in Naples, Florida.

- [Thomas] But this beautiful landscape is often overwhelmed by people who adore it and natural forces that devastate it.

It's all in the family album.

- This is my great grandfather, Bill Brown, who came from England.

In the late 1800s, my great grandfather had a trading post with the Seminole Indians at Big Cyprus Reservation and in this picture my grandfather is with Josie Billy who was a medicine man for the Seminole Indians.

They grew up down in the Everglades together at the boat landing.

When my grandfather passed away, over at the grave, he spoke in Seminole and did a eulogy for my grandfather and they were friends for life.

And on the bottom is a picture of Brown's boat landing.

This was when the Everglades had not been drained by the Army Corps of engineers and at that time, the water flowed freely down in the Everglades.

[dramatic music] - For centuries, people were drawn to the Everglades and its hidden waterways, explorers, outlaws and native Americans pushed from their land by the US Army.

Here, surrounded by mangroves, they lived off the land and the sea.

Leroy Osceola is a artist who lives with his family on land settled by generations of his ancestors who descended from the Seminole nation.

The Everglades is a river, you're saying?

- Yeah.

It comes from Lake Okeechobee and goes to the ocean from north to south.

There's different rivers, ones you see and ones you can't see.

And that's all the lifeline of the Earth 'cause it's like your blood vein coming from your heart, it's the same.

So everything is connected.

- Four generations of the Osceolas gather to share photos that they took and old photos taken by white explorers.

We ask everyone to wear white gloves to keep the oil off the pictures.

So I will pass out white gloves so that we can keep your wonderful family photographs.

Do you think that grandmother would wear the white gloves?

Can someone ask her?

[speaking in foreign language] [all laughing] - [Female] She wants to know what you guys are gonna make her touch that she has to wear?

- What are we gonna make her?

We're gonna make her touch the photos.

Is this you?

- [All] Yes.

- Do you remember this day?

- Mmhmm, Granada Springs.

- [Leroy] That's Fort Myers 'cause I used to work in the fields and travel.

I would always work.

- [Thomas] And who took this photograph?

- She said it was white people.

- Okay.

Could you ask her how things have changed since this picture was taken?

- Unrecognizable now.

- I see.

And which is the next oldest photograph we should see?

[speaking in foreign language] - That's her sister-in-law and her father's mother, she said.

- [Thomas] 1920s.

- [Female] Earlier.

- Earlier, she said.

When the younger people look at this image of your father's grandmother, what kinds of things come to your mind?

- Just overall strength and pride, perseverance through everything that people have gone through in war and in peace.

So that's what I see.

- [Leroy] Because the life is not very easy back then.

- [Mad Bear] Not at all, not at all.

- [Leroy] That's Osceola from back when they painted him after they captured him.

He was in prison.

- This is an ancestor of yours?

- Yeah.

I'm the fifth generation.

- [Thomas] Before Florida joined the United States, Leroy's ancestor, a leader named Osceola fought the US Army in the Seminole Wars.

To this day, his descendants call themselves the unconquered people.

They have never signed a peace treaty with the United States.

- They caught him under the flag of truce.

It was supposed to be a meeting but they put him in prison.

That's when he stabbed the treaty saying that no white man's gonna tell me where to live or how to live.

He said he was a Seminole.

Seminole means being native, the way you were made, your beliefs.

- What does it mean to have the legacy of being unconquered?

- [Leroy] It's who you are and what your beliefs are.

- When you're a young boy going out with your father and your uncles to work, there's certain things that they tell you, teach you and it translates to modern times and how you're supposed to follow in those footsteps as best you can.

- There's a rich verbal history.

It's not anything you'll find in a book anywhere.

That's how we teach that to our children.

- So this [speaking in foreign language], this looks like a work space here.

- Yeah, this is my wood shop.

And I do the large carvings.

The canoe is a very important, historic part of our survival.

Nobody that does it anymore.

I'm the only one that does 'em.

- [Thomas] How did you learn?

- From my uncles, they taught me.

We'll just pull it this way slow.

Grab it over here.

We're gonna put it on its belly.

- Okay.

- It's not done.

I still have to finish it off.

- Can I get inside this?

- Yeah, yeah.

This size is for 10 year olds.

They call it a beginner's boat, that's where they learn how to maneuver and stuff.

- [Thomas] Leroy is an independent Mikasuki, a traditionalist who lives off the reservation and doesn't take income from Florida's multibillion dollar tribal casino business.

- We're an endangered species in the way that we're maintaining our lives and our beliefs the way the creator wanted us to.

There used to be a lot of us but everybody moved to the federal reservations, abandoned their camps.

Some families still living this way but it's not that much, not like it used to be.

- What is the difference between the life that your parents and you have established here versus let's say on the reservation?

- The reservation, everyone's divided in their homes.

The purpose of a camp, it was to keep the families together because being together is a big part of the culture.

- [Thomas] Cutting through Leroy's land is he Tamiami Trail.

Named for the route Tampa to Miami, it connects the west and the east coasts of Florida inviting tourists to take a trip in hours that once took weeks.

In the 1920s, a land developer named Barren Cullier used brand new dredging technology, two and a half million sticks of dynamite and the better part of five years to dredge the Everglades and pave a strip of paradise.

It would take an enormous toll.

Thomas Lockyear heads the Museum of the Everglades in Everglade City.

- When the Tamiami Trail was built between 1925 and 1928, they essentially built a wall directly down the center of where the Seminole people lived and the Seminole traveled by boat primarily.

This was their hunting ground, this was their fishing ground.

You were used to bringing your canoe through this certain way to get to these different areas-- - Like you see right here?

- Yep.

And suddenly there was, what was in all essences a wall.

You think about the idea that before Barren Collier built that road there were no roads.

The way that people got here was by boat.

- All over this area?

- Yeah, all the travel was by boat.

The original settlers came here by boat.

Barren Collier, when he first came here looked around and said, I'll take it, came here by boat.

- [Thomas] Damming the Everglades would upend the ecosystem, harm the wildlife and threaten Seminole culture.

As tourists arrive, Seminole families set up roadside villages, turning their alligator hunting skills into a show that visitors pay to see.

By the early 1970s, half the Everglades are gone replaced by an agricultural eden with land to grow fruit and vegetables and acreage for development and grazing.

[upbeat music] - People saved up money for photos and they would wait for the traveling photographer to come to town.

- [Thomas] Is this your dad?

- [Female] That was my dad.

- [Male] What you saying?

[laughing] - This is my great grandfather, Jeff Thomas, Jefferson Davis Thomas, him cooking and preparing swamp cabbage somewhere in south Florida.

This one was taken in 2011.

And that's me right there and in the middle is Jefferson Davis's oldest son and his name was Dylan Thomas.

He was a cowboy.

He was a real honest-to-God cowboy like you would have seen in the movies.

He's a small guy and that's him cutting up a swamp cabbage, one of the final times I went out with him.

- This is my grandfather's family.

He's on the end down here.

- That's the way it was back in the old days.

It's not like that now.

This looks like old cattle land to me.

There wasn't nothing but cattle everywhere in the state of Florida.

We had more cattle here than they did in Texas.

That was me, I was about five years old riding, well this was my uncle's ranch.

And this is me and my son on the ranch where we live now.

He's just a whole lot like me and we both worked cattle and horses and did a lot of the same things.

- For many, many years, the basic commerce for Florida was cattle way over tourism and way over citrus.

- This was all owned land, taking care of livestock and fruit trees.

They had two rules, you work and you go to church.

That was it.

- [Thomas] Immokalee is the agricultural heart of Florida with a climate well suited for year round growing and grazing.

On a ranch outside town, we meet up with Clint Raulerson, a cowboy who works the same land that his family has for three generations.

- This ranch has a lot of history for me and my family.

My grandfather worked here in 1930.

My father was born right here.

- Your dad was born?

- Yep, my dad was born 100 feet from where we're sitting.

And I get to ride a horse on the same ground that my grandfather rode almost 90 years ago.

That's pretty important to me.

- So your family goes back in Florida ranching for three generations?

What photograph actually talks about that the most on this table here?

- There's actually two.

This picture is of my great grandmother Raulerson.

This is in Polk County in the early 1900s and this is with her children and after this picture, they scattered around the state.

Some stayed in the cattle business.

And this is my grandfather and my grandmother on their wedding day on November 15th, 1930.

It was right here near Immokalee.

He was the first rancher in southwest Florida.

In his business, he was known as one of the best.

- [Thomas] The Raulerson's chose a hard life.

Living in remote cow camps or in Spartan bunk houses like this one preserved by the museum at Robert's ranch.

- Wow.

So my grandfather stayed here sometime in the 1930, '40s.

- So he had a bunk made.

There were several people, there might even have been another bed in here.

- May have been.

They were away from their families.

- [Thomas] So their families like lived somewhere else and then they would just?

- [Robert] Yeah, hard working people.

- How did the legacy pass down from him to you?

- Just being a cowboy is something you grow up wanting to do if you're around it.

It's in your blood.

Around the nation, it's not looked at as a big ranching community but we're a cowboy state.

It's not all about Mickey Mouse and the beaches for Florida.

We take a lot of pride in what we do.

There used to be a lot more cattle from Immokalee south than there is now but between development, government buying up lands, we're losing ranch lands all the time.

- I see a picture of a beautiful woman there with you.

- [Robert] Yes, this is me and my wife.

- [Thomas] How long have you guys been married?

- [Robert] 31 years.

- Wow.

You and your wife, you come from different lineages?

- Oh, totally different.

Mine goes back to Scotland.

She's Mexican.

We have a pretty mixed family.

- [Thomas] Is this kind of a normal family for Immokalee?

- [Robert] Yes, it's a common thing.

Immokalee's probably three percent, four percent Caucasian these days.

- So I'm looking at these photographs of these kids of the ranch.

Do you think your grandkids are gonna follow your tradition?

- [Robert] They already like the ranch.

They already like to be horseback and do things with me.

It's pretty important to all of us.

- So when you look at these images, which are pretty classic images, what comes to mind?

- I get proud.

I do.

Damn it.

To be able to take them with me in the daytime and show them the life that I love and the lifestyle that has built our family, there's just, there's really no words.

It's so important.

They're fantastic and they love it and they want to be out there.

I remember those days.

I think that's one of the biggest things is I remember it and you just, you can't stop passing it down.

I came from a long line of cowboys they say.

My granddad came from Bassinger Way.

Now he watches me do this job I love from somewhere up in heaven above and it's for this reason I sit in my horse with such pride because it's for the men before me that I ride.

I don't consider what I write really poems.

They're more stories, they just happen to rhyme.

It's inspired by all the people I grew up watching.

I just want people to kind of get a window into this lifestyle and realize we are still here.

We're fading a little bit but we're hanging in there.

- I just think it's important to the grandkids.

- All my kids are important to me.

From the sons, daughter and grandkids and great grandkids, they're very important to me.

- This is a Chiba, otherwise known as a goat or a high lift.

And this signifies the hard work that my dad did.

He worked seven days a week.

And we never needed anything.

My mom never had to work, raised eight kids and that meant the world to have such a hard working man who came from nothing and provided for us through picking oranges.

- [Thomas] Immokalee has long been one of the poorest places in the nation.

These images shock the country in Edward R. Murrow's legendary 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame.

- They are the migrants, the underprotected, the undereducated.

- Only on name they are not slaves.

But in the way they are treated, they are worse than slaves.

- The harvest of shame.

The best hope for the future of the migrants lies in the education of their children.

Before the children of migrants, education is not easy to come by.

And there is no case upon the record of the child of a migrant laborer ever receiving a college diploma.

Ever receiving a college diploma.

- Our family's originally from Zacatecas, Mexico.

We migrated and to Immokalee when I was five.

And we've been living here since.

Our father is the pillar of our family.

His hard work ethic is what represents us as a family.

- We chose this picture because this is where it all started, my mom and dad getting married.

After this, they had us and the story continues.

I see us, I see our family background, my brothers, my sisters.

- So these are a little bit of our origin when we made it to the United States.

This is the first picture where my dad and my oldest brother, Philippe, decided that they wouldn't be working for anybody else, they would be working for themselves and this is where their company started which was the beginning of a lot of great things for us.

We worked the field as a big family.

- We'd do a lot of the crops.

We used to do tomatoes and a little bit of everything.

- Once we worked for our own family, we were able to actually come back to school on time because my parents felt education was the only way.

So instead of following their footsteps we needed to create our own.

- [Philippe] I'm the first one to go to college.

I went to the University of Florida, Gator fan.

- We always challenged one another.

He graduated number five in his-- - Four.

- Four in his high school class.

I was number five.

So I was down by one.

- Zulaika Quintero not only earned a college degree.

She became a teacher and is now the principal of an elementary school.

90% of her students have parents who are farm workers.

Zulaika uses her own photographs and story to inspire her students.

And this album is again really beautiful.

- Very antique, okay.

I'd like to start off with a picture of my dad.

So this is my father when we worked in North Carolina.

And if you notice, Miss Quintero's up here making boxes.

Made a lot of boxes, okay.

We did bell peppers, tomato, squash, zucchini.

Give me a thumbs up if your families have done that before.

- This is my grandpa working.

He sends the produce to market.

This is when I was little and they took me.

- This is my mom when she celebrated her 15th birthday and then the baby is one of her cousins.

- This one is a picture of me and my sister.

My mom decided to take us a picture so we wouldn't forget about those moments.

- And what was it like going through all the photographs to get the photographs to bring in today?

- These pictures remind me of how whenever we were little we would go through these pictures together and there would be like a journey.

- [Zulaika] These are our sixth graders and I can't wait until these wonderful scholars end up graduating high school and then share with me which university they're gonna be attending.

- [Thomas] Role models like Zulaika inspire students to follow their dreams.

Dreams that may take them beyond the small communities that dock the Everglades.

When a young person does succeed, it becomes a triumph for the whole community.

Everyone in Everglade City's Island Cafe is rooting for this one, Davonte Detweiler.

- This is a picture of my great grandma and my mom.

I just really like this picture because they both look young and happy and youthful and it makes me happy.

- She was my rock.

She passed away about two years ago.

I don't know how I'm gonna fill her shoes but I'm trying.

- She's doing good.

She's doing amazing.

- Davonte, my son, he's in college right now and I'm very proud of him.

For him to have an interest in journalism, every time I watch the news, I imagine him one day being an anchor there.

And then I have my youngest son, AJ who hopefully follows in his footsteps.

- The example I'm trying to set for my little brother is to never take education for granted.

Most people in Copeland are struggling against drug addiction and financial issues, poverty.

I'm very smart with real life because of my grandma and my mom and I know all that they went through and I'm not someone who's gonna risk it all for something that's not worth it because of them.

They taught me the true meaning and the true worth of life and not to throw that away.

- [Thomas] Fort Myers was an actual fort built for the Seminole Wars on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River.

A young Spanish immigrant named Manuel Gonzalez settled his family here after the civil war.

- Manuel Antonio Gonzalez is my great great grandfather.

He was 14 years old when he sailed from Spain with a handful of boys in I think 1846.

Anybody whose 14 years old and can build a boat and sail to Cuba and knew how to get there at that age is amazing to me.

The Gonzalez family settled Fort Myers, the first settlers here.

- This photo is pictures of the family cattle ranch that was up the river at a site, old Seminole war fort called Fort Thompson.

If you were driving a herd of cows to Patarasa to be shipped to Cuba and sold, that's where the Caloosahatchee got so shallow you could actually fjord the river.

Our history really is kind of the development of southwest Florida.

We were the third family to come into this area after the Civil War and have kind of been around for the history ever since.

- He's my two time or three times great grandfather?

- He's your, he's my four, he's your three.

- Okay.

When I look at this photo of Willaby Tillis it brings about a lot of mixed emotions.

He is my three times great grandfather as well as the slave owner of my family.

It takes my mind every which way.

He was owner and also biological father of my two times great grandfather Nelson Tillis.

- This is Nelson Tillis.

He is my great great great grandfather.

I am so amazed by him because he founded a school, founded a church, he was a landowner.

I feel as though my pioneering spirit was the end result of having this ancestor who blazed a trail.

- After slavery ended, Nelson was the first person of color to arrive in Fort Myers.

Nelson migrated down here with his Caucasian wife, Ellen Sommerall Tillis, and they began to homestead here.

This was a white woman who had everything to lose by stepping outside of the boundaries.

These two had the courage, the love, to set up a household in what had been confederate Florida.

- Nelson and Ellen would have 11 children and many grandchildren becoming one of the important founding families of Fort Myers.

At the Williams Academy Black History Museum, images from the Tillis story are on display but there's still a lot to uncover.

I have something I'd like to share with you.

- Mmhmm.

- The Lee County Black History Society found this photograph.

Apparently, it is of Ellen Sommerall Tillis and her son.

- Wow.

- Have you ever seen this image before?

- No.

- So this is your great great grandmother?

- Yes.

[upbeat music] Wow.

- So the back says Ellen Sommerall Tillis and son Elijah.

- Wow.

That is incredible.

She had at least two children that would pass.

- Uh huh.

Passing meant passing as white in order to avoid segregation and discrimination.

- One was my Aunt Ida and I'm thinking it must've been him.

- He looks like he could pass.

In fact, he looks like he's a blonde hair child.

- Exactly, right.

- Very fair skinned.

- Yes.

- In fact, I can see the resemblance with you with your high cheek bones.

- I think I do look like them.

I do, I do have they're nose.

Yes.

That is so amazing.

- [Thomas] So where exactly are we right now?

- We're in the historic Henderson Cemetery in Fort Myers and this is the grave of Ellen Tillis.

The cemetery was segregated by race.

And so only black people could be buried here.

If a white woman married a black man, she essentially lost her right to be considered a white woman.

If you lived black, you died black.

I always leave little things of remembrance.

Blue because of the ocean, they were fishermen.

Flowers because they were farmers.

- I don't see Nelson's grave marker here.

- No.

There's no grave marker for Nelson because Nelson disappeared and we believe that he was killed.

And so we don't know where his body lies.

I pray that we will know someday.

But until then, we have her, their story and we can build a world from that.

- So what is your relation between the three of you?

- We're cousins.

- We're cousins.

- All three of you are cousins?

Cassandra's search for Nelson's history leads to a reunion that unites two branches of the Tillis family confirmed by a DNA test.

Who's a common ancestor here?

- This right her is Willaby Tillis.

Willaby is the brother to my great great grandfather and he's also Nelson's daddy.

Nelson Tillis, which is their great great grandfather.

- I was wondering who these other people are in this photograph and do you know?

- I know this one right here.

That's James Dallas and he was one of the sons of Willaby.

- Wow.

- So he was a half brother to their great grandfather.

- He was a half brother to Nelson, yes.

- [Thomas] Would they ever acknowledge that connection?

- That's a question that we're trying to answer.

We don't know.

This to me looks like Willaby but I'm no sure.

- [Thomas] So this is almost a family photograph?

- I would think it'd be close to it.

Willaby had quite a few sons.

It could be.

- Wait a minute, that's a picture maybe of all our uncles.

- Could be.

- Wow.

- I'm telling you.

This picture right here really kind of brings it full circle.

We had a memorial service and it was just nice for all of us to be together at the graves of our grandfather.

- Connecting with our family allowed us to move forward.

To find out that we had family and they loved us.

- Yeah, family that loves you too.

It's what's in here and in here.

- Whoops.

- I think there's more that if we really look that'll bring us together than tear us apart.

These are my cousins and I love 'em.

And they love me.

- Amen, amen.

I think it's a powerful testimony of just the resilience of the human spirit.

The ties that bind us, the ties of blood, community, all those things still exist today and the fact that we were able to reach back over 100 years and still pull those positive elements out, justice, love, humanity, those are the things that this teaches us.

[upbeat music] - I was born in Haiti, brought to America at the age of four by my mom.

I don't think they wanted me to show this picture 'cause it's kind of beat up.

It's a picture after my sister's baptism.

I think she was just a few months old in this picture and I had to be about nine or 10.

And my mom is in the picture and my sister's dad would've been right here but I cut 'em out.

And I had another family member, I don't even remember who was here.

But I cut those people out.

And it represents the hurt that I've experienced when I've wanted to cut parts out of my life.

I was upset, I was resentful, I was mad and now I look at this picture and I wish I hadn't cut those pieces out of my life.

I wish that I hadn't tried to pick and choose what was there.

I wish I had the whole picture so that I was able to tell the story as a whole.

- These are my three brothers.

This is me over here.

I'm quite different than I was back then.

We came here with pretty much nothing and looked out for each other.

We sort of fled Vietnam at the post-war.

We landed in Naples, southwest Florida, and pretty much that's where I've been for almost 30 years.

So that's me when I was in 2003.

We're very proud of that we're the first generation to graduate from college and to really be able to start a new life here.

But now I decided at 26, open up my own smoothie store and life is doing pretty good.

- Let's see, well he most significance to me is probably actually the most recent one because it is-- - That's 'cause she's so young.

- It's because I'm so young.

So this photo was taken in 2001 which was my senior year of college and it shows my family.

So my father, me, my brother Will, my mom Sarah and my grandmother Harriet.

And this is at our restaurant, Ridgway Bar and Grill in old Naples.

Even though we've had, well I shouldn't say we, dad, we, the family, has had a restaurant in that location since '76, this particular restaurant opened in 2001 and this photo was taken just a few months before my grandmother passed away.

So it has a lot of significance because it shows all of us together at a very momentous time in our lives.

- This one.

And it's a lousy picture 'cause it's old and it's been ripped.

There's two things about it that are significant for me.

One is that it has a picture of my mother in it who brought me to Naples and it has a picture of the original restaurant in old Naples and that's where I began.

My mom was the person who said to me when I was eight years old if you want a lemon meringue pie, make it yourself.

She was my greatest fan and she was also my best critic.

We all need those.

- [Thomas] Naples is well known for its high concentration of millionaires and billionaires, seasonal residents, who once called on Caroline's grandmother and great aunt to furnish their homes.

- So this was the original R&R Robinson right here.

This building was built specifically for my great aunt Rosemary.

She was an interior designer solicited-- - Wow, what year was this?

- This was in the late '50s.

My grandmother Harriet worked here with her sister Rosemary.

They call this the birth place of Naples.

We say that you come to 3rd Street for glamor and for good times.

- So is it any coincidence that it's actually opposite your dad's restaurant?

- It's a total coincidence but it was a lot of fun.

By the time his restaurant opened there, this business had been here for a long time.

So it was great 'cause when I was a kid, my grandmother was here, we were there, we would walk across the street.

It was a very small town then.

This is really where it all began, right, this is my first birthday.

So this is me with my dad sitting in the middle of the sheet cake on my first birthday.

So my dad was a little bit of a celebrity here in town.

He revolutionized dining in Naples.

And so we got a lot of press for it.

He came in here with all these ideas about fine dining and French cuisine and classical technique and nobody had ever seen anything like it.

- And who's in this photograph?

- So this is my dad, Tony and here's me, little four year old me, and this is my brother Will.

My brother Will was two and a half years younger than I am and he passed away a little over three years ago and he actually took his own life after a long struggle with depression and mental illness and he was an exquisite human being.

He was counsel to my father, he was my champion.

This was us at the original Third Street South Farmer's Market that my dad helped found and we were selling basil that we'd grown in our backyard.

And so a lot of what we do here is just about carrying his memory forward.

- Wow.

- Pretty special, huh?

- Yeah.

- This is what keeps people coming year after year.

It's an incredible natural resource.

There's not that many places in the world that you can come to that look like this that have this just natural beauty.

Can you imagine what it was like to get here in the early 1900s when you had been on trains and boats for God knows how many days and you showed up here in your full Victorian gear and your steamer trunks and there were mosquitoes and you just went all right, I'm in Naples.

- Wow.

So it's changed a lot.

This pier looks new and it's been through several hurricanes.

- It's been through a lot.

It was totally rebuilt after Hurricane Donna in 1960 an substantially rebuilt after Hurricane Irma.

- Oh, so it is new, it is new.

- It is actually new.

But every time they build it, they just do the same thing.

So it looks the same as it has forever.

- [Thomas] The life sustaining water running through southwest Florida and into the Gulf is threatened by urban growth, agricultural runoff and the explosion of red tide that leaves this beautiful beach covered in dead fish for months at a time.

- It's really dangerous and we are a tourist economy.

If people don't come to Naples, we're out of business.

So for us, it's very important to make sure that we are committed to the environment, that we are doing our part.

It's that it is the life blood of what goes on here in Naples.

- [Thomas] Southwest Florida's unique environment has long been a magnet for people.

As the population grows, so does the challenge of protecting this coast, a lesson each new generation inherits.

- I have a picture of here, of daddy with one of his big hauls of Goliath Gripper.

He's with his mother in this picture.

He was kind of legendary as a fisherman.

He learned how to fish these waters.

He could've been a commercial fishing guide, really he was that good, he really was.

That kind of brings me to an interesting story.

Daddy was a developer and he at one time bought a lot of property out in Estero Bay.

It was mostly mangroves.

He had had this wild idea of developing this.

And a guy came along, I think he may have just been a fishermen, maybe came from that area, and he started fighting this.

And out of this struggle between daddy and this early environmentalist 'cause we're talking the early '60s before I think the word environmentalism had even been heard.

Out of this struggle came the Estero Bay Aquatic Reserve which is the first exotic reserve in the history of the United States.

I'd love to meet the man who struggled with my father over this issue at that time.

I want to shake his hand and thank him.

- [Bill] I was born right here about 93 years.

- [Interviewer] Were you an environmentalist back then?

- Well, I guess you'd have to call me one but what got me involved was we lived on Fort Myers beach and we had three small children and-- - [Pat] Not much money.

- Very little money.

But I had a boat and I knew how to catch fish.

So I fished in Estero Bay and we got a lot of our, our food came from fishing Estero Bay.

- Our children loved it and we'd take them out in the bay.

We did something called crickin.

In between the mangrove islands there would be a passage, a small passage, and you could get the small boat through between the two islands.

We call them islands even though they're just mangrove trees growing in the water and we learned to love every aspect of the bay.

It was like our own backyard, our own private park but we shared it with everybody and we wanted it to always be available to the public.

- And when they came, it looked like they wanted to dredge it all up, a group of us got together and formed the Lee County Conservation Association.

And we managed to block it and stop it from being done.

- And the man who was going to build it, the development called it, he was going to build a city the size of Ft. Lauderdale and it would just take up almost all of the bay.

- I have a surprise for you two.

Cynthia Williams.

- Yes, I wanted to meet you both and let you know that my father was Barry C. Williams.

- Oh my goodness.

- Whoa.

- Barry C. Williams, you're his daughter?

- Yes.

I know you probably don't know I existed but I do and I want you to know that above anything else I want you to know how grateful I am to you for stopping daddy and all of his gang from devastating Estero Bay.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

- That's wonderful.

I'm so glad to meet you and know that you don't resent what we did.

- Of course not.

It cost us a few million dollars but you know?

- Well I'm so glad that you all came together and you had this opportunity to reunite.

Thank you for saving Estero Bay and setting a precedent around the country.

- There's no way anyone could thank you adequately for what you did.

- Could I shake your hand?

- [Cynthia] Of course.

- It's so good to meet you and know that everything's okay.

- I just love this picture.

It shows my mom as a teenager and my aunt and my grandparents fishing off of Fort Myers Beach.

That's what I remember the most about my grandparents is fishing with them, bass fishing and fresh water or salt water fishing, always fishing, that's what I remember the most.

- My father survived the hurricane.

He was 13 years old.

He was the oldest of six children.

His mother, five brothers and sisters drowned during the hurricane.

And his aunt and uncle and two cousins also drowned.

This is my dad.

He was a farmer in the Glades with his partner and they are standing in a celery field.

- For me, it's a family history of survival, just resiliency.

And I myself was in a car accident when I was 19 and I sustained a spinal cord injury.

That's why I'm in a wheelchair and I had to survive that.

So just knowing that history of resiliency I think added to my resiliency.

- The interesting thing about this picture is this is one of the Santinis and my Uncle Milton caught and trained the dolphin that would become Flipper.

I do know the song but I'm not gonna sing it.

They call him Flipper, Flipper Faster than lightning - The Kelly and Santini families have pioneered in Chokoloskee Island, Key West and Fort Myers and I currently live in Fort Myers.

We were either fishermen or we were farmers.

So the fishermen lived closer to the beach and the farmers lived closer to the mainland.

I love this photograph.

It's my dad and I and we're playing cards and we're actually on a boat.

This is my dad when he was in the navy.

He's part of the greatest generation.

He served for three years in the navy during World War II.

After he came back from the war, he married my mother a couple of years later and he was a potato farmer in the Iona Area for all of his life.

But what happened in southwest Florida in the '60s, air conditioning became very mainstream.

And now all of a sudden, you could live in southwest Florida and not have to endure the heat and the mosquitoes.

And so farm fields went away and they became really beautiful developments.

But the residents lost their livelihood.

So they had been poor but they could feed their families and then when the farm fields went away, the families fell into poverty.

And so now we're looking at second and third generation poverty.

And multigenerational poverty is difficult to get out of.

And so that's one of the reasons we established the Heights Center is we bring education to the families that live here and we work to build self sufficient families in this neighborhood.

- [Thomas] Kathryn Kelly, an architect, founded the Heights Center, to work with the children and grandchildren of those workers, a place of hope for families mired in poverty on the edge of paradise.

- The community center itself was something that the residents of the neighborhood wanted.

And so for me, it was really a no brainer.

I built buildings for 20 years.

And we want the kids to feel like they're at home here and that they're safe and that they're loved.

And I think we do that.

- When you look at this table, you have lots of images here of your family by the water.

- I see generations of two families that came together that have lied off the land in south Florida and are immured in that whole lifestyle of being around the water.

So everywhere you look were either fields or fishing boats.

That absolutely describes my family.

Okay, oh I love that one.

Let's start with that one.

- [Thomas] Okay.

- Somewhere in the '50s, my mother bought a spear gun and it was the first spear gun ever sold in Lee County for my dad.

We didn't have money but we had a little boat.

And so that was our recreation always.

- Who is this in this photograph?

- Well that's me.

That was a black grouper who weighed about 70 pounds.

- Did you eat or?

- Sure.

Everything that we kill, we eat.

It's never just for sport.

We have five generations of my family on this table.

One of the earliest ones would be right here.

This is one of my uncles mending a fish net down at Fort Myers Beach and then this would be the nets drying out in front of his house.

- Why is this called the paradise coast?

- It's beautiful and if you love the water, it's just an amazing place to be.

It's an adventure always.

- The water used wisely is a lifeline that sustains the mangroves, wildlife, fields and families whose lives are intertwined closely with the land and the sea.

There are other images on this table which go way back in terms of southwest Florida and history.

- This is Dennis Kelly and Olive Santini.

This is the marriage of the Kelly and Santini families in the early 1900s.

She was born and raised in Chokoloskee Island and I can't imagine what it would've been like to have been living back then and raise all the kids that they did on tiny little Chokoloskee Island but they did.

- [Thomas] One of the 10,000 islands, Chokoloskee was once a lawless place where outlaws came to escape and traders came to find their fortunes.

- [Narrator] The magnet that draws us to Chokoloskee is this old country store, Smallwoods.

Captain Ted, who came to Chokoloskee in 1996 is gone now but the store continues under the management of his daughter Thelma.

- [Thomas] A moment of historical deja vu, we introduce Kathryn Kelly to Lynn Smallwood McMillan.

Their ancestors first met right here in 1901.

- Her grandfather or maybe her great grandfather - Great grandfather - Is the one that my grandfather bought Chokoloskee from, the island.

- The deed says $600 and the folklore says and a barrel of whisky which sounds about right.

- [Thomas] The Smallwoods Store and trading post opened in 1906.

- They would come from all over and the Seminoles too, they would come out of the rivers and down here to trade.

They'd bring their furs and their hides, they'd bring a lot of fresh meat for the settlers.

They would camp out here beside the store whenever the run boats were expected until they came and they could get the supplies they needed.

- During prohibition, families from this area were rum runners, including two of my great uncles in the Santini family.

They grew up here and so they knew the 10,000 islands like the back of their hand.

So they could outrun anybody that was after them, although they did eventually get caught.

- [Thomas] And what happened to them?

- [Kathryn] Oh, they went to jail.

- This place has kind of a history of people who have alternative economies.

- This whole area really in some ways was an alternative economy if you think about it because I know they hunted alligators, I know they hunted snowy egret feathers, the beautiful white plumes that you see because those would get shipped overseas.

- [Thomas] This alternative economy gave way when the Everglades were designated a national park in 1947.

Commercial activities were regulated, changing the lives of everyone on these islands.

Stone crabs and tourism now drive the economy.

- But it's been hard.

Like even with the stone crabbing.

The regulations tend to get stiffer and stiffer as time goes by, harder to stay in business.

We have tours now and we're all captains and we all take people on boat tours, air boats, any kind of boat we have, they can go.

That's basically the livelihoods, restaurants, motels.

It's all catered towards tourism.

- [Thomas] Lynn maintains the Smallwoods Store but now as a museum that pays tribute to her family and the Everglades pioneers.

- This is my grandfather and my grandmother.

This is my two aunts and two of my uncles and then this baby was my Uncle Ted.

He was the youngest at the time.

They had six children.

My mother, she was 18 when that photograph was taken.

She was born in 1921 and she was the only one that was born in a hospital when they grew up in Fort Myers, was the closest.

- Did she end up living here as well?

- Oh yeah, she did.

She grew up here, she lived here.

So I grew up coming down to the store here every day to get the mail and aggravate my aunt probably.

- Would you ever consider leaving this place?

- Not full time, no.

Maybe for a few months in the summer when the mosquitoes are horrible.

But when you're a water person, it's hard to move away.

- [Thomas] Like so many, we came to southwest Florida in search of paradise.

We found descendants of pioneers and newcomers building on this strong family legacies and passing down the history of this remarkable place, helping new generations face the future with confidence, hope, and the responsibility to protect this land, this water, that stretches almost forever.

Because the spirit, mystery and promise of vitality that flows through the Everglades is the key to finding paradise.

- [Thomas] Next time on Family Pictures USA: - So, what are you expecting to find?

Or what are you anticipating going into this meeting, in this particular house?

- I think Michael and I know what it looks like for us, but I think the question is how the other side of the Haught family will embrace this notion of us showing up in a world that has historically been occupied by them in the telling of the story.

[jazzy music] [female announcer] Family Pictures USA is available on Amazon Prime video.