Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Family Photographs - Post 14: The Smith Kids

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:


This photograph is an an old brown cloth (?) or leather (?) case, fastened by two gold-colored clips per side. The stand-up feature has been torn off, revealing the back of the photograph, which has pencil markings that read "Davie, Matie & Della Smith" in the open space left by the torn-off stand-up feature. There are no other markings on the front or back of the photograph or the frame.

Now David Davier (Davie) Smith (1863-1920), Mary Ann (Matie) Smith (1866-1922) and Abbie Ardell (Della) Smith (1862-1944) were the children of Devier J. and Abbie (Vaux) Smith who resided in Dodge County WI until 1868, then in Taylor County, Iowa (perhaps 1868-1872?), Andrew County, Missouri (perhaps 1872-1875?), Cloud County, Kansas (about 1875 to 1885), and McCook, Nebraska (from about 1885 on).

There is no date on this photograph. It is obviously after 1866 since the youngest person (Matie Smith) can sit up on a stool. It is difficult to tell the ages of any of these children, other than they seem to be less than age 10 and older than age 1. The next child in the family, Agness Bell Smith, was born in February 1868 and died in April 1870. The next child was Lucian H. Smith, born in June 1875 and died in 1878. My best guess for this photograph is 1870 to 1872, based on the apparent ages of the children. Perhaps the family wanted to obtain pictures of their living children after the death of their youngest at the time.

If anybody else can estimate the date based on clothing or photo/frame characteristics, please let me know.

I didn't want to take this photo out of the frame and casing so I tried scanning it "as is" and got a very blurry image. I elected to take a photograph in natural light of the framed picture and then cropped it in a photo editing program. It is still somewhat blurry, and you can see a lens reflection in this image. I will try to get a better image later. There is a companion piece which came out very blurry so I have to do the work again, anyway.

During my recent "furniture moving" exercise, I went through several boxes and file cabinets in the Genealogy Cave and this picture was found (again) in one of the boxes. I knew that I had it, but I had not seen, or not remembered, the names on the back of them.

The provenance of this framed photograph is from Devier and Abbie (Vaux) Smith, to Henry Austin and Della (Smith) Carringer, to Lyle and Emily (Kemp) 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.

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