question for Ron's vintage photographs/deviney
arborverde
Posts: 0
The attached photo which appears here:
https://www.daz3d.com/rons-vintage-photographs
is identical to a cabinet card photo in a family album. Our photo, one of over 60 of various family members, is unlabeled (person not named). I am seeking this information, if available: who is this person?
ronsvintagephotographs00maindaz3d.jpg
1000 x 1300 - 363K
thumbnail_41.jpg
948 x 1280 - 243K
Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
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Moved to the Commons as it is not a Daz Studio application topic.
Maybe Ron will answer but he likely just got it from one of many digital libraries where archivists went ahead and scanned in troves of old unidentified photographs for historical purposes even though the name(s) and usually the year, place, & age was not written on the photo's back. Or sometimes it was and they just didn't scan the backside or use it to identify the frontside.
It's 1880s. It's not Gertrude Jekyll, I checked.
Tineye has 0 results
My Google image search suggsts Vintage Cabinet Card. Portrait of woman by Gosting Studio in La Mars, Iowa
Also here. So it is an old vintage photo in public domain.
I don't think those are the same image. Different dresses. Though, the women do look very similar.
It is the same model; she apparently did a series in slightly different outfits for the same photographer. The photographer is almost certainly A.P. Webb, a successful photographer of the time. his work can be found in the loads of museums including the Getty and the style matches.
"Alfred P. Webb, photographer, was born about October 1850-53 in Ohio. He was single, when listed on the 1880 Ohio Census in Mahoning County, Youngstown and was boarding on Water? or Walker Street. The Youngstown Ohio City Directories for 1889 and 1890 have Alfred P. Webb, photographer, listed at 120 W. Federal Street. I have had another cabinet photo in my possession that was identifiable as: A. P. Webb and Co., 141 & 143 W. Federal St., Youngstown, Ohio, the date was likely 1885-1890. In 1900, Alfred P. Webb, photographer, is listed in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio, with his wife of 17 years, Charlotte and their daughter Hazel Webb; they were living on Mahoning Avenue. Alfred P. Webb, photographer, and wife and daughter are again enumerated in Youngstown, Ohio in 1910. But by 1920, he and his wife and daughter were living on West Princeton Avenue in Youngstown, but he was working as an Insurance Agent."
This is most likely correct. It was a long shot, but this is the only one of the 20 plus photos that I got an image hit on. Thought I'd try. Thanks for weighing in.
The photos my family has, at least most of them, were taken by WC. Tuttle of Belfast Maine. The subjects lived in Maine - all of them - as far as I can determine. I will have my cousin check the back of this one to see who the photographer was. I don't believe this is the same woman in the photo that was shared above. Cabinet card photos were extremely popular in the late 19th/early 20th century and there must have been thousands of photographers/studios participating. As was suggested above, likely the photo 'Ron' used was acquired randomly without provenance. Anyway, thanks all for weighing in.
As you can see, the studios likely purchased the card stock in bulk, selecting from various designs with their name added by the vendor. These are just examples from the web and not from our specific cards.
I doubt it. This photo is everywhere wearing various outfits & poses but the face remains the same. It's a vintage stock photo. Maybe it is not a family member. Maybe it is just part of the photographers 'resume/portfolio of portrait poses'. Like a portfolio (not a subject) so to speak. My hubby and I worked as advertising specialists and stock photos were always used for ads and websites.
well obviously someone stuck the sample photo in the album to mess with their descendants
its the sort of thing I would do
or they removed a shunned member and stuck it there as a placeholder
a long shot might be an actual ancestor got a discount if they agreed to their photo being used as a promotional photo
The album with this photo was passed down through the family and has over 60 photos, and the 40 + identified ones are all family members, relatives, or friends of the family from Maine in the 1880s or 90s. Many of them were associated with the family oilcloth business centered in Winthrop Maine and most were of the Quaker faith. This is not a 'randomly inserted stock photo'.
It could be an accidentally inserted photo though; the equivalent of those Chinese tattoos that owners think they have the characters of their tattoos for "brave warrior" on their bicep but really have the characters for "eat more tuna". They creators of the album might have kept the card in the album to avoid a blank locatiuon while planning on replacing her with a real family member but forgot and ensuing generations just assumed that the model was a member of the family. It is clear the model was prolific by appearing in so many of Webb's products at different ages. If you are certain that she is a real family member, you could look to see if the model is related to you. I didn't look deeply but there is possibly geneological information on her including the location of her tombstone.
That lady is on a couple of cards with dfiferent angles she might have been an example picture that would have been mass produced on studio walls and then one day got in someones album whoses decendants do not realise its no releation.
Photographs were expensive and some people even then collected them like postcards.
I need a name to search - so far no name, just the photo and its context as clues. Those suggesting that the photo was randomly included in the album, and the photo bears no relation to the rest of the 60 plus photos, are almost surely wrong. I need to get my cousin to check the back of the card to see the studio name. If this proves to be "W.C. Tuttle of Belfast Maine" then I will be sure the subject had a family relationship to others pictured in the album. There are a few photos of unrelated people, but they were family friends, business associates, or had a connection through The Society of Friends (Quakers). As the subject is an older woman, likely around 60, she will have been one of the other subjects mother or grandmother. Birth years probably around 1830.
W.C. Tuttle of Belfast Maine was a prolific photographer so that is not a clue of the identity of the photographic subject. He definitely was a contemporary of Alfred Webb and a similar style. I only did a short survey but his photos are easy to find.
I am willing to bet this was a paid unrelated model, his daughter, or a wife of Webb. If you are not related to Webb you may be SOOL. Also in my inherited family photos of Hubby's Oklahoma relatives who were farmers, we had a photo of two farmers with a pitch fork. They were unrelated. An american gothic created by Grant Wood of a house he thought pretentious and struturaly obsurd. His focus was the odd house. The couple in front of it was how he imagined the owners would look. The models for the 'couple' were his sister (wearing hand sewn garments to suit his vision) and his family dentist. This was in a family photo album. I bet you have downloaded/archived pictures that in 100 years people may find and put in an album and in future years others will assume are family members. Once when I visited NFLD and took scand of a family album my Mom's brother had and saved the to a folder called MOMS Family. My Uncle Don said I don't know who these are but they are not relatives. I said, well they must have been important so I will add them to the family folder. Bet after I die my son sets out looking for family members that do not exist. But he had ADHD . . . he earned it lol.
my photo albums havd lots of non related people in them
my inherited photos from the late1800's have total strangers photographed by my ancestors
I also have home developedB&W photographs from all over Europe and Greece taken by my father just after WW2, he is in some of them but there are literally hundreds of other people
Agreed that especially following the widespread adoption of personal cameras in the early 20th century subjects in photo albums can be anything that appealed to the photographer. Similarly, studios would have samples of their work to illustrate different poses and backgrounds, and for advertising purposes. My father took thousands of photos over his lifetime and for many I have no idea of who the subjects were, and of course they aren't family. In this case, however, all the identified photos are members of several families who intermarried over several generations, many of whom were employed in a family business enterprise. The exceptions are a teacher at a school that several family members attended, two couples who were family friends, a man who was a business partner of a family member (and was distantly related by marriage), and a man in Turkish dress, photographed with a friend who is identified and also in a larger group including that friend. I cannot connect his name with the family directly, but this Maine Quaker community was involved in setting up schools in Palestine and Lebanon around the turn of the century (which would have been under Ottoman rule which explains the costumes worn) and I expect this man was involved with that effort and likely a family friend. The unidentified photos are of various children, a number of women, mostly in their 20s or 30s, and a few men also in their 20s or 30s, plus this older woman. There are plenty of key family members of the right age from this group who aren't identified - siblings of people or spouses of people who were photographed, as well as plenty of children. I know that the identifying labels were written long after the photos were taken because, for instance, there are photos of young women (highschool graduation age) identified by their married names. This can explain the unidentified photos, as whom ever wrote the labels didn't know or remember all those photographed. The labels are all written in the same hand. Long and short - no evidence of photographs of random people in this particular case.Can't be ruled out, but seems unlikely. This is, of course, academic unless I can identify some of the unlabeled subjects. My hope has been to find others who had copies of at least some of these photos with the 'mystery' people identified - thus my query here in this forum regarding the photo of the older woman.