What we see when we look at an old photograph

Here's a photograph of Rebecca Banks Edmondson, Amanda Caroline's mother.

The photograph raises some basic research questions for us. Most simply: how do we know the identity of the woman in the  picture? I have a whole pile of photographs of other people from the nineteenth century that are not labelled. Sometimes I can figure out who somebody is, but most of the time, I can't.

In this case, though, we got lucky. Somebody wrote on the back: "Grandmother Edmondson." It could have been her only grandson Basil Edmondson Newton who wrote it, or maybe it was his mother, Amanda Caroline. I really can't imagine how we have this. The most likely possibility would be that Basil Edwin Newton (your great-grandfather if you are in Nathan Gray's or Aaron Yarbrough's generation) got it from his father, Basil Edmondson Newton. This leads to another story that explains why we don't know more than we do about this Edmondson-Newton part of our common family history.

In 1903, Basil Edmondson Newton abandoned his pregnant wife Nora Alice and his four small children, including Basil Edwin Newton, in southern California, where they had been living for a few years.  We'll learn more about this later.  He remarried a few years later, and after a bit more knocking around got himself a steady gig as pastor of a church in Hope, Arkansas. His son Basil Edwin Newton came from California to live with him in Hope. There, Basil Edwin met Annie Forney Duckett.

But we don't really know what happened to Basil Edmondson Newton's old family stuff, the kind of stuff that we have so much of from Annie Forney's side of the family. Maybe we will locate some of it eventually, through other family branches. For now, we have this photograph, and we know who this woman is because she's identified on the back.

We also know where it was taken. In those days, photographs were mostly formal portraits and taken in studios. People sat for them, had copies made up, and sent them to their relatives who lived far away, as mementos. Sitting for your photograph was a serious business, as you can see here. This photograph is the small sort you could easily send in the mail -- it's only 2.5" x 5".  It's not a tintype, which came a little earlier in the technology of photography. Instead, it's made on photographic paper which is then affixed to a stiff card. The back of the card is imprinted:

"Jno W. Williams/Photographer/Shelbyville, Ky."

According to the 1870 census, John W. Williams, photographer, age 48, was living in Shelbyville that year. Other sources suggest that he was active in Shelbyville as a photographer throughout the 1860s, after having turned from portrait painting to photography as the new technology became available in the 1850s. So this was a professionally made studio portrait.

But what would Rebecca have been doing in Shelbyville Kentucky? Her daughter Georgia A. Edmondson, a younger sister of Amanda Caroline,  had married Charles T. Keeney at Spring Place Georgia in December 1862. In 1870, Charles, now a doctor of medicine, and Georgia were living in Bewleyville Kentucky. We know the Keeneys were living in Shelbyville in 1873, and I will tell you how we know about that in some later post.  Since we also know that Rebecca died in October 1871, we can date this photograph sometime before that, from the late 1860s to sometime in 1871. She would have been in her sixties.

Here's a detail of the same photograph. I think it's probably unusual to be able to see your great-great-great-great grandmother gazing at you across the generations. Even if she's a bit fuzzy.