Unidentified Photos

I saw my mother last weekend, and she handed me a little bag with two photos inside. She said she'd found them among my grandmother's things after her death. Could I identify the people in the pictures? I took a look and my heart sunk. My Grandma and I spent years going through her photos and family documents, but I immediately knew I'd never seen these portraits. There are few things more heartbreaking to a family historian than having old, original photographs that cannot be identified.

Here's what I know about these photos:

• They came from my maternal grandmother, so they'd be ancestors from my Smith/Murray or Rutherfurd/Dickson lines.

• The male subject has a beard that reminds me of some I've seen in family photos taken around the time of the Civil War, so I'm going to guess we're dealing with ancestors from the late 1800s.

• The frame on the female portrait is labeled "M.W. Carr & Co. Boston."  This company appears to have been in existence from 1894 until 1997, producing jewelry and picture frames.

• A closer examination of the frame reveals a tiny inscription above the stand that appears to read "May 19, 1898."

So, which ancestors would have been living near Boston in 1898? 

My third great-grandfather, Samuel G. Smith, was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. However, he had moved to Illinois by 1864, when he married Ellen Partridge in Bunker Hill. All the other Smith ancestors lived in New England much earlier than the late 1800s, by which time they'd gone west.  The Rutherfurds never lived in New England, nor did the Dicksons or Murrays.

I decided to read a little more about M.W. Carr & Co. The book "Commerce, Manufactures & Resources of Boston, Mass: A Historical, Statistical & Descriptive Review" indicates that this company became successful to an extent that its goods were sold throughout the United States and Europe. So, perhaps it is possible that the frame was not purchased in Boston, but elsewhere.

I took a closer look at some of the photos I already have and are definitely identified, to see if there was any resemblance to the mystery photos.  The best candidates are John Bernard Murray and his wife Catherine Daly, and George William Dickson and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Bellangee.

Catherine Daly was born in Massachusetts, but was living in Alameda, California, by the time she married John Murray in 1877. In 1898, John Murray would have been 66 years of age. Catherine Daly would have been 48. I have several original studio photographs of each of them.

  

 

In 1898, George William Dickson would have been 58 years old. His wife, Mary Elizabeth, would have been 54. They were living in Douglas, Wyoming, having come west from Buffalo, New York, via Point Edward, Ontario, about a decade prior to 1989. 

I just have one photo of George, but several of Mary Elizabeth. Looking at them closely, there's a clear resemblance of these photos of Mary Elizabeth to the mystery photo of the woman that I was given. I scanned all of them into Picasa, a photo editing software that I use, and Picasa also seems to recognize the first photo as Mary Elizabeth.

While I can't be sure due to the lack of labeling, I'm fairly confident that the mystery photos are of my third great-grandparents, George William Dickson and Mary Elizabeth Bellangee.