Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Family Photographs - Post 15: Emily as a Child

I'm posting old family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

Here is one of the most precious (to me) images from my Smith/Carringer family collection:



I recently "found" this photograph in one of the boxes with the Smith/Carringer papers, photos and books. It was in a round metal frame that stood, I think, on my mother's nightstand for most of her life. I tried photographing it in the frame, but the image was poor. I carefully took it out of the frame and scanned it, cropped it and put it back in the frame.

Initially, I didn't know who the subject was in the picture. When I took it out of the frame and looked on the back, I saw the word "Auble" printed. This was a Cabinet Card before it went in the frame, and part of the photographic studio name is cut off. My first guess was that it said "Gehrig," "337 W. Madison" and "Chicago." With that clue, I Googled [gehrig "337 w madison" chicago] and was rewarded with Claire Santos-Daigle's (a Chula Vista photographer) Photos Made Perfect web site that shows some photographs from the Gehrig studio at that location - it was the only match for the search criteria! A good guess on my part!

Based on the above clues, I am very certain that this photograph is of my grandmother, Emily Kemp Auble, born 19 August 1899 to Charles and Georgianna (Kemp) Auble in Chicago, Illinois. The photograph was probably taken between late 1899 and mid-1900, as the child looks to be able to sit up but looks to be in her first year. Perhaps it was a first birthday picture.

The provenance of this framed photograph is from Charles and Georgianna (Kemp) Auble to Lyle and Emily (Auble) Carringer, to Fred and Betty (Carringer) Seaver, to me, Randy Seaver. It was "found" last in the papers and photographs provided to me by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period.

This was a new photograph for my digital collection, and I am ecstatic to find it!

1 comment:

Marie Cooke Beckman said...

Randy
I was glad to see your blog that included mention of photographer studio marks(Studio name & location).
I've been meaning to explore this route with several photos of my husband's family. Most of these are from studios in Ontario CA(not an area with which I'm familiar)