Beerbower Family (Click for Family Tree)

What a sweet group of siblings! Today is ‘Sibling Saturday’ and yesterday, November 20, was “Universal Children’s Day,” so it is fitting to showcase some adorable children.

The above photo is from the Frances “Fannie” Isabella (Brown) Chapman collection of photographs, and the owner is interested in finding the rightful home for this photo. It is believed that these photos are from friends or students of either Fannie or her sister Ida, both of them schoolteachers. (They could have also been known by A. Beerbower, of whom there is a photo in the collection, and he may be collateral kin to us.)

As the photo has ‘Photo Tent” printed at the bottom, we don’t know where this picture might have been taken, so it makes it harder to identify the folks in the image.

We do know that a photographer named M.E. Chase was in Urbana, Illinois in 1886, and later in Colorado- there will be an upcoming post on this photographer so watch for that with more details.

The Pritchards need to be researched as well, and there were quite a number of Pritchards in Colorado in the 1880 US Federal Census. There were even some families in Ouray County, where M.E. Chase had a studio by at least February 1900. I will leave the further detective work for those related to enjoy- I am eager to get back to the seventeenth century in Puritan New England.

Please do let us know if you are related to this family, if you know more information about this family or photographer, and/or if you are family and interested in the photo.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. See citations with image.
2. A digression: How presumptuous of us earthlings to use the word ‘universal’ for our special days or contest- there was likely no Martian child on the poster for “Universal Children’s Day” nor I have never seen a “Miss Alpha Centauri” in the “Miss Universe” contest- have you?? At least the “World Series” does include Canadian teams now, though it is still not quite appropriate to use the word “World” in that ethnocentric title either. Humans.

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Original content copyright 2013-2015 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.

Beerbower Family (Click for Family Tree)

This blog has been wonderful “cousin bait.” We have found some new cousins and learned some new family stories. We have also had some folks find us that have family artifacts that they have shared. Sometimes, they have not actually been family,  or they were not very closely related so wished to pass on the item itself, and we were pleased to accept.

We have also found some ‘sadly-not-cousins’- people who contact us, thinking they may be related, but they are sadly not. Today’s post is an example- a person googling A. Beerbower found our posts about the family, so contacted us. I did not think that the image she sent was one of our family, but upon doing more research, well, it appears the image she sent is very likely one of our Beerbower family members. (A. Beerbower will be featured in an upcoming post.)

The pictures belonged to Frances “Fannie” Isabella (Brown) Chapman who was born in 1845 in Michigan, the third child of nine born to Lemuel Brown and Catherine Lyman. Fannie trained as a teacher and moved about 1871 to Valmont, Colorado. In 1872 she married Volney Chapman (1823 – 1907). He was one of the original ’49ers but had moved back to his family in Michigan about 1860, only to remove to Colorado after 1870. He and Fannie built a house in Loveland, Colorado which is still standing. They had three children: Lloyd, b. 1876, Verna b. 1877, and Charlotte b. 1879. Fannie sadly died when she was just 41. Her sister Ida also taught but in Kansas, married and also died young.

One of Ida’s descendants said they had some pictures of friends also and he wanted to donate them to a library or archives in Michigan; our correspondent said she will do the same with the pictures no one claims as family.  “Most of the pictures are from Iowa, Michigan and one from Indiana.  The ones I had been able to locate were mostly born in the mid to early 1840’s.  I hate seeing the ones I have found ended up in a dusty basket at an antique store so I have been on a search for family.”

Do let us know if you are related to any of the folks in this post or those upcoming about Fannie’s photo collection.

The above image is labeled 1- Russell, 2- Green, 3-[unreadable- Cook?], 4- Green, 5-nothing written. It was pasted down, no photographer information available.

More to come from Fannie’s collection.

1. The Frances “Fannie” Isabella (Brown) Chapman Photo Collection

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Original content copyright 2013-2015 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.

Beerbower Family (Click for Family Tree)

Today we are posting the pictures of most of the ladies in the Frances “Fannie” Isabella Brown Chapman Collection. We are wishing that descendants of these lovely ladies will find this post and have a new photo to add to their family treasure chest.

See previous post for more information about the collection.They were friends of Frances Isabella (Brown) Chapman, and possibly of our family’s A. Beerbower. (More to come about him.)

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Frances Isabella (Brown) Chapman Collection of Photos.

Please contact us if you would like higher resolution images. Click to enlarge images.

Original content copyright 2013-2015 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.

Beerbower Family (Click for Family Tree)

If these are all friends and family of Fannie (Brown) Chapman, and if ‘A. Beerbower’ is one of our family members, they might be friends of his too, thus they must also be friends of family… sort of like Google Circles or Facebook friends of friends, right?

Today we are posting the remaining gents in the Fannie Belle Brown Chapman collection of photographs. See previous posts for more information about Fannie, her sister Ida and this collection. (An upcoming post will have the A. Beerbower images.)

Please do let us know if any of these gentlemen are your folks!

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Posted with permission of the current owner of these photographs, in hopes they might find their proper home.

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Original content copyright 2013-2015 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.

Beerbower Family (Click for Family Tree)

Any family historian lucky enough to find a batch of photos is likely to find some in that batch that are not labeled, or have incomplete labels. Sometimes a photo might include just a first name, or a place, or a date- frustratingly often just one of these, or just nothing. After all, the original owner knew who all the people were, so why put names on them??

Tuesday’s Tip: Study each photo individually to glean as much information as possible, but also look at the photo in context with others found with it, and others you may have.

These photos were in the Fannie Belle Brown Chapman Collection. The family believes these were friends and/or schoolmates of Fannie and her sister Ida, and hope that they can find descendants and give them the images. (Contact us if you are related!)

So how does one sort out who is who?

1. Keep collections or boxes, envelopes, scrapbooks, etc. of photos together; include the negatives if you have them.
2. Making a scan or taking a picture of them all laid out in the order you received them might be helpful.
3. If you are scanning a scrapbook, scan each page and number accordingly, then scan individual photos at a higher resolution. This will help keep the images in context.
4. Label your scans appropriately. Include the name of the collection, side of the family, type of image, and anything you can add to help ID the photo. An example of a file name for the above picture might be:Year_four digit month/day_SPEERY_Lizzie_fm Fannie Belle Brown Chapman Collection_tintypeThis will ‘automagically’ sort your images by date and person; I use individual family folders and when people become adults, they get a new folder with the two names:CHAPMAN_Unknown- BROWN_Fannie BelleI usually put the husband’s name first, as adult records are generally under that name for both of them.
5. Now that you have familiarized yourself with the collection as you scanned the images, and have a record of their context, look at each image carefully. Look at them in a variety of lights, and tilt them in the light to see if you can find any markings on them- both pencil and ink fade over time, but sometimes the ‘graphite’ of a pencil will glisten if angled just right in the light, or there may be an impression where the writer pressed hard. Enlarge your digital images- sometimes the camera will pick up something your eye did not.
6. Write down everything you know about the image, using metadata, and a text file that has the same name as the photo but ends in ‘.txt.’ (TextWrangler is a good text app for Macs.)
7. Look for clues in the photos. For example, the above photo was labeled as, “Lizzie Speery.” Looking at other photos, there was another, older Lizzie in the group:

   

   It is hard to read the writing, but this photo definitely says, “Lizzie”- maybe ‘Hines’? Then it looks like the name of a city, and possibly ‘NY” after.

   Think about the context- two Lizzies, the only person to have 2 photos in the collection. Different last names, but the first image was a young girl, the second a mature woman, and the different last name is likely a married name.

   Could these Lizzies be the same person with some years in between photos? Take a look at her eyes, chin, nose- what do you think? (Let us know in the comments.)

8. Try to date the photos by dress, type of image, etc. Maureen Taylor, “The Photo Detective,” has excellent books, webinars, classes, speaks at genealogy conferences, and will even do video/phone consults; there are other resources as well to help determine approximate time periods. In the case of our two Lizzies, dating each photo might help us determine if they could possibly be the same person. Lizzie might have been a childhood friend or a distant cousin, possibly who moved away, but then the women exchanged photos in later years?
9. If there is information available about a photo studio on the back of the image, use Google to try to learn when and where the photographer was in business to give you clues. They often changed the backs of photos as they added a partner or one moved on, or just to update their look or logo. Sometimes images on eBay can even help one determine the years a photo studio was in business, giving you another clue to time period.
10. Crowd-source your detective hunt by posting your unknown photos on a blog, a website such as DeadFred, Facebook, etc.And, as always, keep copies of your photos and the description file on your own computer or media- online services may not be here forever, some use proprietary software that will not be readable in the future, etc. (Text (.txt) files  should be readable for a long time.) This is redundant but redundancy is a good backup. Keep copies of all these images somewhere other than your computer- a drive you keep in a safe deposit box, give to a sibling, etc. The cloud is a good option too, but not failsafe, so always have your own copies.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Fannie Belle Brown Chapman Collection, with permission.
2. Lizzie Speery apparently worked as or with a photographer.

Please contact us if you would like higher resolution images. Click to enlarge images.

Original content copyright 2013-2015 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.