Wednesday, July 14, 2010

(Not So) Wordless Wednesday - Post 111: Unknown Ontario Family

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

I managed to scan about 100 family photographs in the Scanfest in January, and have converted the scanned TIF files to smaller JPGs, cropped and rotated as best I can. Many of these were "new" to my digital photograph collection.

Here is a photograph from the Carringer family collection handed down by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period:


The only clue that I have about the family in this photograph is that it was taken by a photographer in Simcoe, Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada. Since my great-grandmother, Georgianna (Kemp) Auble was born in Ontario, it is very likely that this is a photograph of the family of one of her siblings or cousins - perhaps not with the Kemp surname.

I'm not smart enough to figure out the clues from the apparel or hair styles. My best guess is that this photograph was taken between 1890 and 1910.

I checked my genealogy database, and found no Kemp families that resided in Simcoe. Perhaps Simcoe was the place in Norfolk County that had a photo studio when the photo was taken.

Another clue from the photograph is a family composed of a father (perhaps aged 40 to 50), a mother (perhaps aged 35 to 45), two sons (perhaps aged 15-20 and 5-10) and a daughter (perhaps aged 10-15). Unfortunately, I cannot find a sibling of Georgianna's that fits this profile, or a Kemp cousin of Georgianna's that fits this profile. Unfortunately, I don't have complete family information for all of the Kemp's in Ontario, nor for the collateral families surnamed Sovereen (Georgianna's mother was Mary Jane Sovereen (1841-1874)) or Putman (Georgianna's grandmother was Eliza Putman (1820-1895), daughter of John Putman and Sarah Martin, who married Alexander Sovereen (1814-1907)).

I'm hoping that by dropping some names here that someone will search for those names and will recognize one or more persons in this photograph. If you know who is in this photograph, please tell me!

3 comments:

Cathi at Stone House Research said...

Randy, I think the photo was taken a little earlier than 1890, judging from the sleeves on the dresses. The sleeves that puffed where they attached to the bodice became popular about 1890.

Anonymous said...

I do commiserate...I have a whole collection of photos from the Attridge family bible with no names or identifiers of any kind. How frustrating is that?

Lynn Palermo said...

Randy
I live in Simcoe,perhaps I can help. This is a farming community, were they farmers? could be they lived in the rural area around Simcoe, try Vittoria, Woodhouse, Port Dover, those are the oldest. I would have to check dates about some of the other communities. Perhaps you can contact the local paper The Simcoe Reformer, they may just run the picture for you and do a story. It is still a very small town paper that serves a very large rural community.