Photographers' Marks (Photographic Puzzles, part 2)

Last week I offered some tips that have helped me identify old photos. As promised, I want to share a success story.

Mr. Y e-mailed me several photos from his family collection that had no identification, including this family group. He knew which branch of the family they came from, and that they had lived in Wilson, N.C. He suspected this was a picture of his great-grandparents. Mr. Y had started with genealogical research, including census records, to get the names and ages of children in the family. He asked if I could come up with any more clues.

Photos courtesy of the Yarborough family

I wasn't sure if I could help, at first. I thought the boy in the back looked like he was wearing a military cape, but I'm not an expert at clothing clues and I didn't want to steer anybody wrong. I finally decided I would just look up the photographers' marks and not spend too much time on this lovely puzzle.

The names on the left were a little hard to read from the scan, but I picked out "Engle." I didn't expect to find him in my Photographers in North Carolina book because of the Philadelphia mark, but I looked for him anyway — and got lucky.

Apparently John F. Engle had a long, illustrious career, making photographs all around the country, including Philadelphia. He did spend some time in North Carolina, and worked with a man named Lund. Look closely: Lund is the name beneath Engle on the mark. And in the center is an elaborate E and L.

I looked up the other name. Viggo Lund worked with Engle in 1897 on Nash Street in Wilson. They worked together other years in Elizabeth City, but since this family branch lived in Wilson, the time they had a studio there would be a good assumption.

Most of the photographers in the book worked in certain areas for several years or even decades. But these two men worked together in that town just one year. Amazingly, that narrowed down the photograph to 1897.

According to Mr. Y's research and more recent photos, the young man with the mustache is probably his great-grandfather, Bud Perry. The older couple are his step-father and mother, Claiborn Perry and Zilphia Smith, who had five children at home in 1900. In 1897, the two boys would have been about 12 and 15, and the three girls age 9, 7 and 3. Bud, 20, got married in December of that year.

This cabinet card appears to be the boy on the right in the family photo, Weston Perry. The couple's youth and prominent display of rings suggest a wedding photo. Francis Marion Winstead was a photographer from 1880 to ca. 1908. This picture was probably taken between 1898 and 1908, when Winstead returned to Wilson and worked without a partner, because only his name appears on the frame. Those dates also fit the likelihood that Weston would not have been married yet in the 1897 picture (at age 15).

This lovely young lady also posed for Francis Marion Winstead. Upon closeup comparison of her face with the two dark-headed girls in the family portrait, I think she is the little girl on the right. That puts this photo toward the latter part of the 1898-1908 window.

Mr. Y is hot on the trail of his ancestors, armed with a few more clues. And once again I'm glad I invested in a good reference book that provides such useful information.

Solving photographic puzzles

Last year when I spoke at the High Point Library about preserving old photographs, I mentioned how I had identified some 19th and early 20th-century family photos that weren't labeled.

1. Learn to recognize faces. After looking at many different pictures, I learned to recognize my great-grandfather, his mother, and his uncle, even when they were very young or very old.

2. Compare frames. As I recognized my g-g-g-uncle in one photograph with a white, textured paper frame, I remembered that one of my unidentified pictures had that same kind of textured frame. That connected the person to my uncle, probably from the same sitting for a photographer. After comparing the faces with other pictures, I realized this was his youngest son, but much older than in any of his other pictures.

3. Use genealogical research to fill in other people. In a five-generation photo, I knew everybody except the little boy. I found out that the young lady in the photo only had one son and he was her first child (which would make a family want to pose for a 5-gen photo). A more mysterious photo had my young g-grandfather with a young woman, who looked nothing like my g-grandmother. Paw was an only child, so who could she be? After extensive research, I realized that he grew up in the same household with his aunt - they were one year apart. I concluded that they must have been like brother and sister, and therefore posed for a portrait together.

4. Look for clothing clues. I'm very much an amateur in this area, but Maureen Taylor is an expert. I enjoy reading her blog about how she solves photo mysteries.

5. Use the type of photograph (daguerreotype, tintype, paper, etc.) to narrow down the timeframe when it was taken.

6. Use photographers' marks to further narrow in on the year and possibly the location of the photo.


One of the people who came to my class at the library recently sent me a photographic puzzle, and step no. 6 turned out to be a huge clue. I'll tell you more about it in the coming week.

Genealogical Epiphany: A Blessed Injury

I recently made a Storybook (photo book) for my uncle, which required scanning my dad's negatives from the 1950s. The fun part was getting together with my maternal aunt so she could tell me who the people in the pictures were. But she mentioned something that really surprised me. She said, matter-of-factly, that my uncle's brothers were given a vaccine in the military that made them sterile. What?!

Yes, she nodded. Something that was supposed to protect them from biological warfare. Hallie never had any children. Neither did Husie. Clark had a child before going off to war (I'm not sure if this was World War II or the Korean War), but never had any more after he came home. My uncle, who never went into the military, had children, and so did his sister.

I filed that tidbit away in the back of my mind and a couple of busy weeks passed. Then one morning in the shower (a popular place for brainstorms), I started thinking about my dad's side of the family. Daddy's brothers served in World War II. It suddenly occurred to me that Jack never had any children (he had a stepson). Gene couldn't have children, so he and his wife adopted. Wayne never had children, either. All three were overseas in combat. Their younger brother Randall had children (16 years apart!), but he stayed in the U.S., stationed in Texas near the end of the War. Most of our cousins came from the girls in the family.

I think Daddy was drafted. He packed his things, gave his class ring to his sweetheart (Momma) and reported in. But Daddy had a bad ear from a childhood injury, and they sent him home. That ear bothered him all his life.

I'm not one of those anti-government people at all; I've always relegated clandestine experiments and government cover-ups to the X-Files and other fiction. And this is all conjecture; I don't have any proof.

But here's the epiphany (as the water in the shower grows colder) — if it weren't for Daddy's injured ear, my sister and I might not be here.

The lure of antiques

I like to venture out to estate auctions, when I can, although I know they can be dangerous to the wallet. When an ad appeared in our local paper for a sale just down the road, with an old spinning wheel as one of the attractions, I called my uncle as an accomplice and we decided to make a morning out of it.

To make a long story shorter, we had a great time browsing and people watching, but I didn't get the spinning wheel — a small flax wheel in good shape which went for nearly $200. (I should mention here that I already have a great wheel, that I got for a steal at another estate auction!) I also bid on a lovely secretary, the kind with a glass-door bookshelf above the hideaway desk. I wish I could post a picture for you (lesson learned: bloggers should take pictures even if they don't buy anything). The secretary was skinny, still had the key to its desk, and had that dark, almost black finish that I see in very old furniture in this area. And here I'll mention that dealers were present — I could have bid a little higher, but I didn't stand a chance.

I did find one thing, though, and came home satisfied without losing all my money! A stack of old postcards; I had seen only the top one because they were in a glass case until time to sell. I was very happy as I flipped through my new treasure to find that many of them were local. They had been written on and posted (with 1 cent stamps), dating around 1900 to 1909. The addresses consisted of just a person's name and the city — that's all they needed back then.

Postcards - several are 100 years old.

A few were actual photographs, with that negative sheen on the dark portions.

A few birthday cards and letters were thrown in the lot. One letter, however, was written not in the early 1900s, but during World War II. The contents are so fascinating — not only great genealogical information, but also juicy gossip from a young local woman — that I'm considering posting the contents. But I need to check with a few people, first, because the author is local and may still be living.

Another thing I noticed was the use of the word "thy" on a couple of postcards, by the same writer to a friend. It could have been an endearment, but with the Quaker presence in this area and the timeframe, I wouldn't be surprised if the author spoke and wrote the second person familiar all the time.

Postcard of the Randolph County Courthouse, which was just renovated.

Our oldest photographs and 'The Last Muster'

I thought that photographs from the Civil War era were old. That is, until I saw Maureen Taylor’s latest book, “The Last Muster: Images of the Revolutionary War Generation.”

The Revolutionary War? We didn’t have photography back then, did we?

Well, no. Aside from a few experiments in earlier years, photography as we know it started about 1839 and quickly spread around the western world. Itinerant photographers appeared in the major transportation centers of North Carolina, such as Fayetteville and Raleigh, in the 1840s. A father-and-daughter team opened up a gallery in Greensboro in 1851. And in those years, people who were born in the mid- to late 1700s were still alive.

People who lived through and remembered the American Revolution.
People who had their pictures taken.

Who better than Taylor, nationally known as “The Photo Detective,” (@PhotoDetective) to seek out those early pictures of older Americans? For her book, she verified the subjects and painstakingly documented their lives.

The photographs include several Quakers, which give us a connection to the religious group who settled Bush Hill (now Archdale). Unfortunately the book does not include an index of place names, but connections to North Carolina include Waxhaw, an unnamed Moravian community and Dolley Madison, who was born in Greensboro.

Most of Taylor’s subjects, however, lived in New England. So I set off on a quest to find one of these early photographs of someone from our region. I figured that the Friends Historical Collection at Guilford College, one of my favorite repositories of local history, would be a great starting place.
I found several photographs of early settlers around the Randolph-Guilford county line, such as William B. Hockett (1799-1880, Centre Friends area) and Allen U. Tomlinson (1802-1879, Archdale), but they were too “young.” Finally, I came across a file about Nathan Hunt. I’d seen a large portrait of Hunt many times in the library, but I didn’t know much about him.

Hunt, who was a young man during the Revolutionary War, was a Quaker minister who lived next to Springfield Meeting. Even though some of his journals were accidentally burned, there’s a wealth of documentation and stories about his life. Not only was he an interesting man who traveled extensively and witnessed a lot of history in his 95 years, he was also my kinsman: my first cousin, seven times removed.

Guilford had another painting of Hunt in storage and several sketches. I also found what looked like a very old, deteriorated photograph in the file folder.

It was heavy, like glass, but it didn’t look like glass. Like an ambrotype, the faded image could be seen better when placed on black paper, but the image was positive and ambrotypes are negative. And it wasn’t thin enough or the image sharp enough to be a daguerrotype.

I felt pretty silly when, weeks later, I found out the picture was actually an early 20th-century printing plate, probably used for a newspaper article. Here I was, trying to figure out which type of old photograph it was — no wonder it didn’t meet up with the historical descriptions!

Images obtained courtesy of the Friends Historical Collection, Guilford College, Greensboro, N.C.
No use or distribution without permission.

I suspect that the large, intriguing portrait of Hunt from the 1930s was painted from a daguerrotype, but I couldn’t find any evidence. Perhaps if I searched for a long, long time, as I do in my own family genealogy quests, I could find out. But I’m on deadline and the paper must go out.

That doesn’t mean I came home empty-handed. As modest as Quakers were — they didn’t even write names on their tombstones until the 19th-century — I am amazed that we have so many likenesses of Nathan Hunt, who saw the American Revolution first hand. His life is wonderfully documented, including letters and part of a journal that still exist. A summary of Hunt’s life is found here.

But the hunt for that one daguerrotype, without success, shows me just how hard Maureen Taylor must have worked to pursue 70 of these photos and the stories behind them for her book. She found additional images of people who lived through our “unillustrated war,” but finding documentation about each person was an even greater challenge than finding the photos.

“The vast majority of these individuals were not wealthy, could not write, and left no written record of their life,” Taylor wrote in her introduction.

I like the variety of the people she did find — different nationalities, races and economic groups. A few of her subjects lived to be more than 100 years old. The colorful stories of their involvement in the Revolutionary War even include a few women.

And it’s the stories that give life to the faces.

“The Last Muster” is available through www.kentstateuniversitypress.com and amazon.com. Taylor’s previous book, “Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photographs,” is on display at the Heritage Research Center at High Point Library.

Update: I received a copy of the Last Muster to review for the Archdale-Trinity News. I was under no obligation about the content of the review, nor to include it on my blog.