A Couple Couples

What to do with hundred-year-old photographs of people no one remembers? I don’t know what you would do, but I can’t bear to not let them see the light of day. Without much fanfare, I’m going to spend the next week assembling like poses and posting those groupings. Since I don’t know what to say about these people, I won’t be saying much. Consider this my penance for not participating in GeneaBloggers’ “Wordless Wednesdays.” This may not be a month of Sundays, but let’s count it as my Week of Wednesdays.

Could this first picture be a wedding memento? I know that white as the color for wedding gowns was not in vogue until Great Britain’s Queen Victoria made her fashion statement in the ceremony in which she wed Prince Albert in 1840—and, in any case, did not become a custom followed by women of more humble standing in rough-and-tumble regions of the midwestern United States until many decades later. Interesting enough, this Wikipedia entry on the topic uses for an example a photograph from the same studio—Lindner—as that featured today from Edna Tully McCaughey’s collection.

In today’s world, it would be a short ten-mile drive up Interstate 90 from the Lindner studio on Commercial Avenue to the 1870s studio of Henry Iverson on 117 Archer Avenue in Chicago. Just as close is the pose struck by these two couples. 

At first glance, I almost thought this might have been the same couple, but a closer examination of the details tells otherwise. Oh, how I wish I knew who these couples were!