This week’s Sepia Saturday photo of a postman delivering
the mail via horse and cart reminded me of this studio photo:
It is glued onto the black paper quickly chipping away in
my grandaunt Helen Killen Parker’s photo album. The two children are just
another of the hundreds of mysteries and unidentified friends and family
gathered in photo albums and shoeboxes. Studying the faces, enlarging the
photo, reviewing family units, and comparing to other photos have produced little
to help me draw any conclusions about this charming pair.
The only REAL clues lie in the other photos on the 2-page
spread.
On the same page is this phuzzy photo:
Are they the same children a few years later?
The other photos are just chips, maybe half inch wide by 1”-1.5”
long like this one:
The photos seem much older than others that Helen may
have taken herself, so I wonder if the photos belonged to her mother Mary
Theresa Sheehan Killeen Walsh. Maybe the pictures are of her as a young girl.
However, she had at least 2 brothers and 4 sisters, so a photo of just 2
children does not seem likely. Nor does it seem likely she would have had a professionally-produced
photo of only two of her own 8 children.
Another thought that just today occurred to me is that
maybe the two children are Helen’s father John Joseph Killeen and his sister
Bridget as children. That certainly matches the family makeup. Do the photos look
like they date from the 1870s-early 1880s when they would have been children in
Ireland?
What about this photo of a young boy with cow? The boy certainly
resembles the child in the cart. Is that a thatched roof in the distance?
Thinking out loud here on my computer screen has brought
me to a realization that should have been obvious before now: as a descendant of
John Fleming Walsh, Mary Theresa’s second husband and Helen’s stepfather, I
need to remember that in a blended family, those unidentifiables may very well
be from the “other” family whose importance cannot be denied.
Wendy
© 2019, Wendy Mathias. All rights reserved.
I love the girl's bow. Great photos, even the fuzzy one.
ReplyDeleteThat's a champion bow, for sure!
DeleteGreat photos...even if unidentified. Hard to tell if the first photo is taken in Ireland, since it's a studio photo. I have a box of these photos inherited from my paternal grandmother. My dad wanted to throw them out, because they were unlabeled. But I still have hopes of identifying some of them from context.
ReplyDeleteI've managed to identify quite a few previously unidentified photos, so it's worth hanging onto them. You can do it!
DeleteLove that first photograph, but how on earth did the little girl keep that huge bow in her hair ?
ReplyDeleteHA - yeah, her hair looks a little thin. I doubt they had velcro yet. HA HA
DeleteThe boy with the cow certainly seems to match the studio photo. And your thinking out loud makes sense too. One of the reasons blogging about our families is valuable is that we sit with the images and stories and documents and as we try to document what we have or explain to an "audience," we begin to have insights we didn't have when we started.
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly it. You get me!
DeleteI said this before, but I think you could be a detective in another life. There are so many possibilities with these photos and so few answers but yet you keep pursuing what you can to try to figure things out.
ReplyDeletebetty
Thanks Betty. I do like watching detective shows - maybe they're rubbing off.
DeleteThanks for sharing here...and especially the questions in your mind. I just have given up my conjectures because so many conclusions seemed wrong. But you've inspired me to keep questing in ancestors. And keep on looking at the unmarked photos. My thought is that though young man in the last photo might have been given the chore of milking, or even feeding chickens, he's certainly not dressed for it!
ReplyDeleteGood observation about the boy's clothes. He does seem better dressed for church than chores.
DeleteYour family seems to have so many mystery photos that they deserve their own blog label I think. The pony photo looks like 1910s when white bows and sailor suits were a popular fashion. The boy with the cow and chickens looks identical to the boy with the pony. (The roof is not thatched but shingled likely with cedar shakes.) I think an itinerant photographer brought his pony cart to a farm and set up a theatrical backdrop for a faux studio shot, and then took another with the cow.
ReplyDeleteHA - I guess the "Etc" covers that!
DeleteBut you've burst my bubble, and I'm mad at myself for not considering the era of bows and sailor suits. I think 1910 makes much more sense. Back to the drawing board. Maybe this is family back in Ireland. I'll have to think about that.
The mystery of who is who and who belongs to whom is always a challenge with old photographs. Why folks didn't think to write names on the backs of photos or at least in the albums they put the pictures in is sometimes a bit maddening. Having become truly interested in trying to identify these namesless people has led me to begin writing names on the backs of all my own photographs!
ReplyDeleteI'm guilty of NOT writing names. I went through a spurt of writing on the back but stopped and haven't gone back. I have a bin full of photos that I should work on.
DeletePhuzzy photo. You crack me up!
ReplyDeleteI guess I could have gone with "Fuzzy foto" just as easily.
Delete