Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Family Photographs - Post 24: DJ and Abbie Smith in early 1870's

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 picture was taken at the same time as the picture of the Smith children posted here, probably in 1870 to 1872. It is the same size and the same style of photograph as the Smith kids photograph. Attached to the back of the photograph, inside the frame backing, is a white piece of paper that seems to say "Devier & Abbie / married in 1861 / on April 6th." I don't know whose handwriting it is - it may be Della (Smith) Carringer's.

The persons in this picture are Devier J. Smith (1839-1894) and Abigail (Vaux) Smith (1844-1931), who married in Rolling Prairie, Dodge County, Wisconsin (I have 4 April 1861 as the date from the Family Bible).

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.

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.

1 comment:

Abba-Dad said...

I really wish I had these kinds of photos of my ancestors. They are truly amazing. So jealous...

I wanted to give you a tip for taking these kinds of digital photos (if you didn't know it already). Many digital cameras have a macro setting. The Canon Powershot series has a little flower icon when you use this setting. The idea is that you can take extreme close-up pictures and still get good focus. My uncle told me that this setting was made originally to be able to make digital copies of papers from as close as possible (like in old spy movies with those tiny cameras). I've used this many times and the pictures don't come out as blurry.

You might also want to get some bright light on the framed photo and turn off the flash.

Hope this helps.