Another Hundred Year Old Photo Heads Home

It was back on February 13 when I sent a Facebook message to the only descendant I could find in the family of Alta Barnes. Since I had found not one, but five, photographs of Alta's family, I really wanted to send those abandoned hundred year old pictures home. But you know how Facebook messenger can be—especially for those of us who are trying to reach out to people who are not "friends"—it is never certain that the message actually gets delivered.

I remember a while back when Facebook expected people to pony up one dollar for the privilege of contacting not-friends. At other times, I had heard that the message just doesn't get sent—leaving those who gathered up enough guts to contact a stranger to twist in the wind of self-doubt.

I didn't really know where I stood, in the current not-friend contacting policy at Facebook. Judging from the lack of any answer, I figured the current protocol was to leave the messenger guessing.

Late last Thursday evening, though, my Facebook message-in-a-bottle got answered. I wasn't even looking for it, so was just about to shut down everything for the night. Thankfully, I spotted it and sent back a hasty note.

With relief, I can now let you know that one of the biggest family photo collections I had found since starting this abandoned photograph project is now headed home. Although the photos will not be going to Alta's grandchildren—at least not yet—they will be mailed to a family member. For that, I'm excited. Hopefully, this relative is in touch with Alta's grandchildren and will be able to share from the collection.

It's been interesting, as I do this project, to see how some people are so enthused to receive such an old family picture, while others are next to impossible to even contact. I guess that goes to show us that genealogy is not the uppermost consideration in some people's minds, as inconceivable as we may find that thought. And while some people just adore old photographs, others look at them as just so much clutter to be discarded. In my mind, I've started imagining a Groundhog Day scene where the descendants boxes up old family photographs, send them off to some secondhand store to get rid of them at a profit, and turn around only to find the photos being returned to them, time after time, in a never-ending time loop of the same scene.

At least, my experiences haven't brought me to any descendant at that extreme. Yet.

For now, the photos of Alta Barnes and her siblings will at last be on their way back home to Oklahoma. The biggest group to have stumped me is finally going to be reunited with family.

Above: The photograph of big sister Alta Barnes and her baby brother Jimmie and younger sister Helen are finally headed home, along with the rest of the photographs of the Barnes family.

Baby Fay

My attention has been kidnapped lately by a hundred-year-old postcard addressed to a Mrs. Henry Keefe in Red House, Nevada. Other than the space dedicated to inscribing that simple three line address, the entire card was crammed with details about the charming baby whose photograph was featured on the reverse of the Azo postcard.

It's true that I've given up on my previous pursuit, trying to find a descendant for the last series of photo postcards I had worked on—well, given up for the time being, at least. Hopefully, someone will eventually answer my emailed pleas and connect me with a likely prospect. For now, we need to set aside the five photographs from the Barnes family of Kansas, and see what else can be found in the collection of abandoned photographs I found in that antique shop in the foothills of northern California. I really want to send another one home.

With this old postcard, the one addressed to Mrs. Keefe, it was meant to go to a place so tiny, it isn't really even an official location on the map. Lately, Red House is categorized—at least in some places—as a "census designated place" in Humboldt County, Nevada. If you aren't familiar with that county, I'm not surprised; the only city the place contains is Winnemucca, the county seat.

But I'm not so sure the postcard ever got mailed. For one thing, it didn't look like it had suffered a run through the mail system, though perhaps it was sent, enclosed inside an envelope. However, if it did actually get mailed, I'm not sure how it would have arrived at its intended destination; looking at the closest census year (1920), it doesn't appear that there was anyone by that name living anywhere in Humboldt County, Nevada—Red House or elsewhere. Not even in the thriving metropolis of Winnemucca. 

Above: Address written on the reverse of a hundred-year-old Azo photo postcard; photograph currently in possession of the author.

Faded From Memory

While I've been struggling to identify the members of Alta Barnes' grandparents' generation—in hopes of identifying just who those tall cousins were flanking Alta's mom, Clara, on that fifth orphaned photograph I found in northern California—I've been stalling for a second reason: the photograph itself is too faded to see well.

All that tap dancing around Clara's parents' family trees have been of no use. It made more sense to me that Clara would be standing with cousins from her mother's side of the family, but no one else on Harriet Hagar's side of the family had children—at least that I could tell.

Harriet's siblings—Lucy, Henry, and Charity—weren't that easy to trace, themselves. I could find the oldest three children as part of the Hagar family in Kansas as recently as the state's 1865 census, taken in June of that year. The baby of the family, Charity, arrived that September, thus missing the official record by a matter of only a few months.

September likely was the last anyone would see of Charity's mom—also named Charity—and I suspect she died during or right after the baby was born. The reason I suspect that is because, after that point, I can find the other children scattered about in other homes, but not with their parents. Their brother Henry—at least if I have the right one—was listed in a family by a different surname until joining his by-then-married oldest sister, Harriet, in the Tousley home in time for the 1880 census. Likewise for baby Charity.

Lucy, on the other hand, seemed to have disappeared entirely—perhaps succumbing to an illness which might also have taken her mom, or by marrying and forever disguising her maiden name so thoroughly as to never be found again. Who knows? Perhaps in her married years, she was the source of the mysterious cousins, though I doubt it at this point.

Youngest sibling Charity also couldn't have been the source of the unnamed cousins, as we've already discovered in pursuing the events in her life through the local newspaper reports.

Yet someone apparently knew who those mystery cousins were, for the faded photograph—though undated, possibly taken as early as 1893, the year of Harriet's death—was lugged all the way from the family's Kansas home to some place in the foothills of northern California. Faded from view as well as from memory, the portrait of four women and two men reveals some details of the clothing, but only the barest of outlines of facial features.

What I was hoping for was that our photo manipulation program would help clear up the scan, at least enough to make out the facial details. Unfortunately, though the program in past versions would do that, it no longer includes that easy fix. With thanks to my daughter for her best effort, we can catch a glimpse of what these folks once looked like, but only the faintest glimpse.

For what it's worth, I'll post it here anyhow. The photo manipulation did bring out some interesting details no longer visible in the original. If nothing else, it's a visceral reminder of how easily our memories can fade from view—sometimes, even with our constant effort to revive and restore those life moments we've tried to capture for future generations.

Above: Undated photograph from the studio of J. L. Cusick in Arkansas City, Kansas, with a handwritten label on the reverse: "Clara Tousley, girl standing between two cousins." Photograph currently in the possession of the author.

A Case of Being Neighborly?

Sometimes, wandering through old newspapers can give a researcher more than she bargained for. I was simply looking for an obituary for Alta Barnes' maternal grandfather, in hopes of finding a listing of possible relatives of this Kansas family. This I needed to explain why Clara Tousley, Alta's mom, had been included in a photograph with the unnamed family of her cousins.

Nothing is ever simple. From one step, I slid into another step, then another step, each one luring me farther away from my original goal to determine the names of those family members and locate a possible relative who brought the photograph from Kansas to California, where I found it.

So now, I've stumbled upon a newspaper report that Clara Tousley's father had died suddenly. Apparently, the family didn't take that report so well, despite the fact that Isaac Tousley was, by then, at least sixty three years of age. According to the local paper, the Arkansas City Daily Traveler, on November 15, 1900, Isaac had been

on the road near his home and stopped at one of the neighbors where he complained of being cold and they gave him something warm to drink. He laid down on the bed and apparently fell asleep. A little later it was discovered that he was dead.

I realize that, back then, it could be possible, if someone needed to go somewhere, that walking to his destination would be considered an acceptable mode of transportation. However, to just drop by a neighbor's home to ask for something warm to drink, and then just make one's self at home and take a nap on said neighbor's bed, well...that's just a tad bit too neighborly, I'd think.

The Tousley family evidently thought so, as well. Perhaps it was no surprise to learn, in the next day's paper, the report headlined, "Relatives of Isaac Tousley Will Have Inquest Held."

Of course, the same story was repeated in that newspaper on November 16, adding the name of the unfortunate neighbor—a Mr. Humbert—to the details of the preceding day. The warm drink, it turned out, was simply hot tea. The nap, supposedly, lasted about an hour or so—although when you do the math, it seems Isaac Tousley slipped away almost immediately after drinking his tea.

But there were a few other details added in that second report. Among other considerations,

[Isaac] has lived here for many years and is well known. He has accumulated considerable wealth and has not been troubled by sickness. He has not complained of feeling sick until just a short time before his death.

These were a few of the considerations causing Isaac Tousley's relatives to call for an inquest. This turn of events led me to believe I'd find much more on the incident in the following days' reports, but scouring the newspaper led to nothing further. Whether it was foul play against a local government official or an unfortunate case of sudden heart problems, I'll never know—at least, without sending for a copy of his death certificate and perhaps even the inquest paperwork.

That, however, I'll leave for avid genealogists among Isaac Tousley's descendants. For me, it's back to my original purpose: to track down who the cousins were in that photograph so I can see if they were the ones bringing the photograph of Isaac's daughter Clara out west to California.

When Questions Lead to More Questions

With the last of five hundred-year-old family photographs I found in an antique shop, I was hoping to figure out how these pictures of the Barnes family from Kansas ended up in northern California. That last photograph, after all, was the oldest of them all, featuring the mother of the family as a young girl standing "between two cousins."

It seemed the more I saw in the pictures, the more questions they left me with. Of course, I had tried to figure out who those two strapping young men were in the photo—the two who were supposed to be Clara Tousley Barnes' cousins. I still can't find any likely explanation.

Then, I began wondering why Clara would have been included in a family photograph with a family other than her own. Though the picture was horribly faded, I could tell, of the six people included in the portrait, that at least one of the women seated in the front row was likely a member of the previous generation. Perhaps this was the cousins' mother.

Why, then, would Clara be included in this other family's photograph? That question prompted me to look at Clara's own timeline. Could she have lost her parents at an early age, and been raised by an aunt or uncle?

As it turned out, Clara's mother did die relatively young. Harriet Hagar Tousley had just turned forty when she passed away in 1893. At that point, Clara was fourteen—a possible reason why she would have been living with another relative.

But her father, Isaac Tousley, was still alive. Though he was a farmer, by the time he lost his wife, his only two children were of an age in which they could take care of themselves. Granted, farming could take a man away from child care duties, but such requirements would hardly be necessary for teenagers, who at that time might be out working in the fields, themselves.

I took my question to that handy newspaper archive hosted by the Arkansas City public library. The first clue I found only added to my questions. It was a brief entry in the Arkansas City Daily Traveler on December 5, 1900:

J. C. Alsip has been appointed trustee of Silverdale township by the county commissioners, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Isaac Tousley.

J. C. Alsip, as it turned out years later, became the father-in-law of Clara's brother John, but that's getting ahead of our story. We also learn from this brief mention in the paper that Isaac Tousley had been serving as a trustee in the local government of his Kansas community. But the main point, of course, was that he was dead. And death meant there should have been an obituary. Of course, I had to look further.

Expecting to simply find a memorial entry regarding the family of the dearly departed, I was somewhat surprised to discover, in the same newspaper on the earlier date of November 15, the following:

Word was received here this morning of the death of Isaac Tousley, a farmer living about fourteen miles northeast of the city. The deceased was well known in the city. His death was very sudden.

Whose Cousins Were Those Two Cousins?

Sometimes, notes added after the fact can help identify the faces in old family photographs. Other times, they only muddy the family tree.

When I found the note on the back of that fifth Barnes family photograph abandoned in a northern California antique shop, I thought it would be quite helpful. After all, the other four pictures had enough information to piece together the family of Alta Barnes and her siblings Mollie, Nellie, Helen and Jimmie from Silverdale, Kansas. From there, it was a quick jump on Ancestry to locate census records showing me their parents were Forrest and Clara Tousley Barnes.

Thus, the trust element was high for the remarks entered on this fifth photograph. Naturally, when I read the comment, "Clara Tousley, girl standing between two cousins," I figured those two young men flanking her would naturally be her cousins.

Now, I'm not so sure. I've gone through many a family's photographs and read notes penned in the shaky hand of a desperate near-ninety-something great-grandmother, hoping to preserve the memory of her ancestors for those young ones she was about to say goodbye to for the final time. Whether in the rush of an urgent errand, or the fog of a fading memory, sometimes the notes left behind turn out to be, well, not exactly accurate.

Which gives me cause to ask, "Whose cousins?" Were they Clara's cousins? Or the unknown writer's cousins?

Or were they cousins at all?

Finding Clara's cousins would mean stepping back a generation to find the siblings of Clara's mother or her father. Clara's mother, Harriet, had a surname often rendered by alternate spellings, so it could have been Hager, or the alternate version, Hagar. Clara's father was Isaac Tousley, a name occasioning spelling woes of its own.

Neither appeared to have siblings who married and had children—at least, not that I could find. That, of course, means only that...I couldn't find them.

While I kept plying every trick I knew to flesh out the rest of the family trees for the Hagars and the Tousleys, a nagging question kept eating at me: why would Clara be standing in a picture of someone else's family in the first place? What happened to her own father and mother?

Clara's mother lived to be a relatively young forty years of age at her passing, it's true. But it was the loss of Clara's father that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to take the inevitable detour down the rabbit trail. It wasn't that he was sixty three years at his death, or that he passed only a few years after his wife. It was the unusual recounting in the local newspaper of what happened that made me take a second look. 

There Was This Aunt . . .

...and some mystery cousins. Can you tell I'm coming to the end of my rope, trying to figure out any connections to the Barnes family from Kansas whose five photographs I found in a northern California antique shop?

Searching through that wonderful newspaper resource I found at the Arkansas City Public Library, I noticed one thing while researching Alta Barnes and her sisters Mollie, Nellie and Helen: there seemed to be one aunt whose name kept popping up. For instance, the Arkansas City Daily Traveler mentioned, on August 7, 1925, that

Mrs. Roy Fresh, Silverdale, and sister, Alta Barnes, are spending this week with their aunt, Mrs. Charity Hume.

We already know that Mrs. Roy Fresh was Mollie, one of Alta's older sisters. But how did Charity Hume fit into the picture?

It would be easy to ignore this clue, if it were a solitary blip on the family radar. But it wasn't. Not much after that first mention I found in 1925, there was another, this time on November 6, 1926:

Mrs. Forest Barnes and son of Eaton, Kans., and her daughter, Mrs. Alta Williams of Kansas City, came down on Thursday for a visit with their aunt, Mrs. Hume.

Perhaps this more oblique reference to "their aunt" actually helps clarify the relationship. Mrs. "Forest" Barnes was Alta's mother, Clara. Between that first mention of a visit in August, 1925, and the second, Alta had gotten married—on November 20 of that year. The second visit was just before Alta celebrated her first anniversary. Alta's only brother—James, the one who at the end of his life donated his remains to science—was barely six years old at the time of that second visit, so by necessity, would have had to accompany his mother on this visit. But whose aunt, actually, was Mrs. Hume? There were two separate generations involved in this mention.

As it turns out, Mrs. Charity Hume was the younger sister of Alta's maternal grandmother, Harriet Hager Tousley. Charity appeared in the 1880 census in the household of Isaac and Harriet Tousley, thankfully listed as sister-in-law to Isaac, instead of any of the less diligent labels sometimes applied by weary census enumerators.

According to the 1900 census, Charity and her husband weren't married until that very census year, when Charity was thirty five years of age, and her husband, Wallace, was forty one. Reading between the lines in those subsequent newspaper entries in 1925 and 1926 tells the story of why so many family visits were mentioned in the town's social column. The original note in 1925 was likely mentioning a visit designed to console a recently-widowed relative, as Charity lost her husband Wallace Hume just a few months earlier, on February 9.

As often happens to couples in their later years, while Charity may have appreciated the visits meant to comfort her in her loss, those visits in 1926 may have served a secondary purpose: Charity's own health may have been declining after her husband's passing.

The little reports came more frequently, and revealed longer visits. Besides the note in November, 1926, there was an earlier one on October 15:

Mrs. Mollie Barnes Fresh came down the last of last week for a visit with her aunt, Mrs. Charity Hume. Mrs. Hume accompanied her home Monday for a longer visit.

Again, on October 29, another report:

Aunt Charity Hume spent the latter part of last week with Mr. and Mrs. John Tousley and family.

John, Alta's mother Clara's only brother, may well have been doing his part in rallying with family to provide support for his aunt. With all this mention of doting nieces and nephews, there was nothing said—at least in the local newspaper—about Charity's own family. While the 1900 census may have left a confusing impression that Charity had children of her own, looking closely points out two details: first, that the children in the Hume household were actually those of her brother-in-law, Alvin Hume; and second, that the small entry next to her own name indicated that she had no children of her own. The 1910 census confirms that situation. If anyone were to attend to her ailing health in the year after her husband's passing, it would be members of her siblings' families.

The last mention of visits to Aunt Charity appeared in the newspaper on June 18, 1927:

Mrs. Charity Hume is visiting with relatives at Eaton and Silverdale this week.

Not long after this point, on June 28, Mrs. Charity Hume apparently succumbed to her illness and joined her husband in their final resting place near so many of her relatives, the Parker Cemetery in Arkansas City, Kansas.

It was not solely on account of these newspaper reports that I felt compelled to scramble to locate just who Charity Hume was. Though I'm glad to trace the family connection, I was looking for a different clue—one to help with the last photograph in the collection I found in that California antique shop. It was a group photograph of Alta's mother, Charity's older sister Clara, along with five other people. On the back of the photograph was the explanation: "Clara Tousley, girl standing between two cousins."

Who were those two cousins? Could they be the California connection?

Above: Handwritten note entered on the back of a family photograph of six people, taken at the studio of J. L. Cusick in Arkansas City, Kansas; undated photograph currently in the possession of the author.
  

Could Helen Be the Link?

One by one, I've been going through the family of Forrest and Clara Barnes, trying to figure out just how five of their family's photographs made it from their home in Kansas to the foothills of northern California. So far, I've uncovered not one clue. And I'm running out of possibilities, arriving today at the youngest of the Barnes sisters.

Alta Barnes' youngest sister, Helen, was different, however. Though some of the Barnes girls had married in their teens—Alta was sixteen when she and Webster Wayne Williams were married—Helen had other plans. By the time of the 1940 census, she was out of the Barnes home, living in Kansas City, where she was finishing nursing school. Between the time of the census in April and the following August, she had found her way from Saint Joseph's School of Nursing to Alexandria, Virginia, where she found employment as a private duty nurse.

By the end of August, 1940, Helen had become Mrs. Oda Nichols. How long—if at all—she continued applying her nursing skills in a work setting in the Washington, D.C., area, or how long she remained a resident in Virginia, I can't tell. At some point, though, she returned to the midwest, settling by 1971 in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Sometime, in all that transition, Helen Nichols became Helen N. Burchell. The only way I know that is from that stack of digitized newspapers made freely available online through the Arkansas City Public Library, a resource for which I've become extremely grateful. On account of that searchable collection, I found Helen N. Burchell's obituary, published in The Arkansas City Traveler on Tuesday, September 6, 1983. She had died the preceding Saturday in Muskogee.

Then, of course, I had found the headstone marking her resting place, back in the same cemetery in Arkansas City, Kansas, where so many others in the Barnes family had been buried. That stone, by the way, was the one she shared with the memorial to her brother Jim, the one who had donated his body to science.

Still, I find no indication that Helen had moved any farther west than the region around Kansas and Oklahoma. That leaves me with no explanation of how those five family photographs would have shown up in northern California. Usually, when restoring such orphaned photographs with current family members, I can discern a path from the family's origins to, say, the Bay area; from there, it's only the minutiae of how antique dealers go about their business that determines where a photo may land.

In this case, though the photographs remained intact in one collection in Jackson, California, there is no member of the entire Barnes' immediate family who had children or grandchildren who moved to California—not, at least, that I can find.

More important than solving that minor mystery, though, is being able to find a living descendant who would be interested in welcoming these pictures back into the family. That is what I am hoping for the most.

With one picture in the collection still waiting to be shared, we'll have just one more day to ponder what our next step will be.

Above: Helen Naomi Barnes, cropped from a family grouping taken circa 1922 in Silverdale, Kansas; photograph currently in possession of the author.

The One I was Wondering About

There was a time when I wondered whether Nellie Barnes—the third girl in that Kansas family photograph I found in an antique store in northern California—had actually lived past her teen years. Someone had written an explanation on the back of that picture to note that Nellie had just gotten over a fever, and, in my opinion at least, Nellie did look a little tentative in the sisters' portrait. It didn't help to discover that, after that photograph was taken, her parents had subsequently named another daughter Helen—a name often shortened, during that era, to Nellie.

With the discovery of that wonderful cache of newspapers close to the Barnes family home, I was able to trawl through decades of newsprint published in nearby Arkansas City, Kansas. There I found several entries about various Barnes family members. Some of the entries were lengthy, others quite tiny, but all provided clues about the family to help me piece together a clearer picture of just who these people were from Cowley County, Kansas.

Of all the Barnes children of Forrest and Clara, according to her obituary, Nellie turned out to live the longest—to ninety four years of age. Perhaps her bouts of childhood illnesses actually served to strengthen her. Then, too, it was she who had the most children of her siblings, being the mother of five sons who lived to adulthood.

When she was eighteen, Nellie married Frank Earl Crouse, an Arkansas City native, and settled down with him in their first home on a farm near Silverdale, Kansas. The couple raised their family on the farm, where they stayed until moving to Arkansas City in 1946.

Frank, however, was not as long-lived as Nellie, dying at seventy eight years of age in 1975. Perhaps her sons took after their father more than their mother's strong constitution, for by the time of Nellie's own passing in 1996, three of her sons had already predeceased her. By now, of course, all five of them—Freddie, Forrest, Ernest, Paul and Norman—are gone.

In tracing the descendants of the three sisters in that original family photograph I found, I keep seeking a clue to explain just how that picture—now, up to a total of five picture postcards—might have ended up in California. The farther I trace down each sibling's line, the more I find family members who staunchly stuck to their home turf. Other than wandering over the state line to live in Oklahoma, almost every one of the Barnes family children and grandchildren remained in the area where Forrest and Clara once raised their children.

There was one exception, however: a sister who, after completing high school, went on to become a nurse. Her occupation opened doors for her to travel elsewhere to find work—and yet, even this sister didn't head out west, but on the contrary, made her way back east. While her line won't likely provide an answer to my dilemma, it does hold out a possibility of finding a willing family researcher who might be interested in receiving these orphaned photographs. The only problem, though, is that even though this is the Barnes family history researcher I think I've found through Ancestry, it isn't anyone who has been inclined to answer my message.

Mollie's Story

So many times, as we research the lives of the women in our ancestry, we find nearly a blank slate. To find the answers to our questions about the basic details of a woman's life, it is sometimes easier to glean the details from a male relative's records. Such was the case with the older sister of Alta Barnes, the one whose family photographs I found in an antique shop in northern California.

When I first started researching, based on the information I found in the original photograph of Alta and her two older sisters, I thought perhaps Alta had subsequently lost both sisters, due to their apparent poor health. It was that serendipitous find of the newspaper cache at the Arkansas City library in Kansas that showed my assumption was wrong. Mollie, the oldest of the three girls in that original photograph, lived well into her eighties. I just had to find the right surnames by which to trace her life's story.

The first clue was a brief mention on the social page of the Arkansas City Daily Traveler on Friday, August 7, 1925:

Mrs. Roy Fresh, Silverdale, and sister, Alta Barnes, are spending this week with their aunt, Mrs. Charity Hume.

That was it, just a fraction of a column inch on page five, but it provided a married name for at least one of Alta's sisters. I didn't yet know who it was, but the clue was gratefully noted.

I later learned that Mr. Fresh was Orin Roy Fresh, and that he and the Barnes girl—it turned out to be Mollie—had followed the path of so many others in the Barnes family and had gotten married just over the state line in Kay County, Oklahoma, in 1924.

When I found the other photo postcards besides the one I originally located, there was one featuring Mollie, front and center on the steps outside the door to a humble building. True to the tradition of the other postcards from Alta's family, this one had several labels on the reverse. One, at the very center of the card, said simply, "Aunty." A second note, in a different hand and type of ink, added, "Miss Mollie Barnes," and on a second line, explained, "Hardy."

Perhaps someone else thought "Hardy" needed more explanation, for yet another pen and handwriting style added, "Okla.," lest anyone assume it referred to Mollie's married name.

I have yet to find any documentation showing Mollie's residence in Hardy, Oklahoma—wherever that is. In both the 1930 and 1940 census, Roy and Mollie were living in Creswell Township in Cowley County, Kansas, the same county in which Mollie had lived almost her entire life.

I found little else on Mollie until 1958. The year of 1958 must have been a rugged year for Mollie. Barely six weeks after she lost her father at the end of October, her husband succumbed to "a lingering illness" on December 14. Like many other members of the Barnes family, Mollie buried her husband at Parker Cemetery in Arkansas City. And, after another twenty six years, she was laid to rest at his side.

That isn't quite the end of the story, though, for only a few years after Roy's death, in the 1962 obituary for Alta's own husband, I found mention of Mollie once again—only this time, she was referred to as "Mrs. Mollie Moore." Yet, by the time of her own passing in 1984, I could find no obituary in the Arkansas City newspaper, though I did find a funeral notice. Though family members were there to serve as her casket bearers, there was no listing of survivors.

Since there was no mention of the details anywhere else, it was back to her first husband's obituary to search for any details on Mollie's life. It was there that I learned the couple had moved to their property just outside Arkansas City in 1926, where Roy operated a saw mill. The couple also operated a farm at a different property near Dexter.

The main clue in this life review, however, was that Roy and Mollie had no children, possibly the reason why very little was mentioned about Mollie's passing so many years later. No mention of descendants, no work outside the home—other than the (surely demanding) businesses the Fresh family operated—and no significant community memberships all added up to a sadly lacking obituary when it was Mollie's time to say goodbye.

Above: Undated photo postcard labeled "Miss Mollie Barnes, Hardy, Okla." Photograph currently in the possession of the author.

Alta's Baby Brother

It was quite a gift, when opening the bag in which I had stashed the orphaned photographs I had rescued from an antique store in northern California, to realize that I had not only purchased one photograph of little Alta Barnes, but several of her family. While the original picture showed Alta with her older sisters, the one I want to share with you today features Alta again, but this time it was she who was the oldest of three siblings. The other two—her next younger sister Helen and baby brother James—stood in front of the same building where her own likeness had previously been captured about one hundred years ago, but this time, Alta was the teenager. And, unlike the earlier pose, this time she was smiling.

We'll discuss the little girl in this more recent photo later, but today, I'd like to focus on the baby in this portrait—mainly because of the corresponding discovery, in that archive of newspapers I found yesterday, of that baby brother's obituary nearly fifty eight years later.

The littlest one in this photograph was labeled Jimmie on the reverse of the picture, but he was officially known, in an adultier version of his toddler self, as James D. Barnes. Jimmie arrived in the Barnes family at the start of a new year, on January 24, 1920. He likely left all too soon for his family at the relatively young age of fifty eight, dying in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he and his wife Jean had made their home.

Thanks to the library archives of The Arkansas City Traveler, the April 22, 1978, issue included a brief summary of Jimmie's life for those back home in Kansas who remembered him. His obituary clearly identified him as son of Forrest and Clara Barnes, listed his birth date and even where he attended grade school and high school.

Thankfully, the obituary also identified for us the married names of his sisters. Mollie was now Mrs. Moore, Nellie had become Mrs. Crouse, and Helen—the young child in the photo below—grew up to become Mrs. Burchell. Of course, we had already discovered Alta's married name, Williams, but the obituary helped steer me clear of my original speculation that perhaps the illness-plagued Nellie had not survived to adulthood.

Of course, seeing someone whose life seemed cut short—James died at age fifty eight—always causes me to wonder what might have happened. I look for details on what life might have been like for the person I'm researching. In James Barnes' case, his obituary provided some of the details, but it was through pursuing his wife Jean's name and the name of her business that I located the details to further explain James' story.

His obituary explained that

He was employed by Santa Fe Railway for 27 years in the clerical department and...was a veteran of World War II.

That, however, doesn't necessarily explain what might have devastated his health. I needed to delve further into this man's life story.

James Barnes seemed to be a business-minded person, since he "opened Jean Barnes Gift and Book Store" in Oklahoma City, back in 1960. Just in case the store was still in business, I decided to Google it. That was a good hunch. It provided me two memorials for Jim's wife, who had subsequently remarried and kept the bookstore running for many years afterwards. Among other gleanings, one mentioned that Jim had died "after a battle with lung cancer" and that the couple had originally moved to Oklahoma City in the 1940s, when Jim was transferred there by the Santa Fe Railway.

James Barnes seemed to have been generous in a practical sort of way, having a note in his obituary that the "family requests a memorial in his name to the elevator fund" at the Oklahoma City church he and his wife attended. What was more remarkable was discovering that Jim had not just one memorial posted on Find A Grave, but two. There was one for a headstone found at the cemetery back in Kansas where many of his family members were buried; the memorial inscription is shared with one for his sister Helen.

The other is a memorial found at his adopted home, Oklahoma City, in which James Barnes' name is inscribed with that of many others, under the heading:

In grateful remembrance of those who are laid to rest here. They bequeathed their mortal remains to further medical education and research in Oklahoma.

Above: Photograph of Alta Barnes Williams of Silverdale, Kansas, with her younger sister Helen and baby brother James D. Barnes; undated Azo Post Card circa 1922; currently in possession of the author.

Why it's Worth it to Take a Second Look

When the answers aren't forthcoming on our diligent search to locate an ancestor, it pays to go back and take a second look.

I find myself saying that when, barely a week ago, I was talking about newspapers—and how I couldn't find the obituary for the youngest girl in a hundred year old photograph I found in a northern California antique shop.

Well, I took a second look.

I can't say exactly how I stumbled across this serendipitous link, but I was prompted by the discovery of four more photographs linked to Alta Barnes Williams, the little girl in the photograph from Kansas I've been talking about lately.

What I did, this time, was head back to Google and search for the name of newspaper publications in the area of Cowley County, Kansas—the place the Barnes family called home for at least three generations. Thankfully, in the catalog of hits for that search term, Google served up one that caught my eye: a repository for free access to the newspaper archives for Arkansas City, Kansas.

Apparently, though not the county seat for Cowley County—that honor goes to neighboring Winfield—Arkansas City is the county's municipality with the largest population. Thankfully, some civic-minded residents supporting the Arkansas City Public Library, with the assistance of the V. J. Wilkins Foundation, saw to it that the city's newspapers were digitized and made freely available online at the library's website.

With the collection ranging in dates from 1876 to 2009, it offered me an excellent resource for tracing any mention of the family members related to Alta Barnes Williams. Since the family had been long-time residents in the county, and since old-time newspapers often carried columns focusing on the social news of various communities served by their coverage, I was abundantly rewarded for my tentative foray into search mode that second time. Everything from mentions of Alta coming to town to visit relatives while she was still attending high school to obituaries of the family members, one by one through the years, was readily located, thanks to the collection's search function.

Since I've found those additional Barnes and Tousley family photographs, I can now couple some of them with the details gleaned from the newspaper collection at the Arkansas City Public Library—a match made in researchers' heaven.

When Guesses Turn Out to be Wrong

It's a good thing I did a thorough second look through that bag of photographs I brought back from Sheri and Jacqi's Most Excellent Adventure in the northern California foothills. If you thought we were done talking about little Alta Barnes and her two big sisters, you are as wrong at your guess as I was. There was not just one picture of Alta. Not two. There were several. And, thankfully, Alta saw to it that the others were adorned with chatty notes on the reverse, as well.

How did I miss that? Guess I'm not a stickler for details. Or perhaps there was so much happening on that whirlwind shopping spree, I missed focusing on that one detail of names. As long as a photo included a name, I was happy—and not particularly concerned whether the one name matched any others.

A few more details from the backs of these additional photographs tell me I need to keep looking for more clues. One postcard, for instance, labeled the photo of a woman as "Aunty"—and then provided her name and the town where she was living. It turns out to be Alta's older sister Mollie. Another postcard is a grouping of three, including a toddler, but this time, the youngest isn't Alta—she's now the oldest of the three siblings. Yet another, labeled "Baby Face," is dated March, 1910, and includes Alta's married name. It includes a very faded note which I'll likely be able to read better by the help of a magnifying glass.

It's a good thing I had invested some time in extending Alta's family tree. Otherwise, I would have had no idea whatsoever that the much older photograph of a family grouping included Alta's mother. Its only label was the name, Clara Tousley. Thankfully, we know now how Clara fits into the family picture. Perhaps with that clue, we can figure out who the others were in the photo, despite lacking any other names—thanks to some explanations written in a hand looking suspiciously like Alta's own.

While I'm waiting—hopefully—for a response from the person I identified as the closest descendant I could find online, we'll take a day each to examine these additional photographs. Maybe a few more discoveries will pop up, once we slow down and search for the fine details.

A Sterling Opportunity

When all else fails in trying to locate a suitable descendant to gift a long-lost family photograph, fling some cousin bait out in the ether and hope someone follows the stardust to this humble online abode.

Since I haven't figured out the likely California recipient of Alta Barnes Williams' hundred-year-old photo postcard by the usual, tedious method—building out her family tree and looking for closely-related researchers on Ancestry.com—this will be my next step. My favorite candidate for this attempt turns out to be a maternal first cousin to Alta, born in Kansas only three years before Alta's own arrival in nearby Oklahoma.

First, a little explanation about Alta's family constellation. Alta's mother was born a Tousley—a name less common than Alta's own surname Barnes, but so much more likely to suffer spelling abuse at the hands of the occasional census enumerator. Clara Tousley had an older brother named John, who spent most of his life in the location of the family home in Cowley County, Kansas, except for one special time. In March of 1905, he slipped across the state border to Kay County, Oklahoma to say those life-changing little words, "I do," to one Lillie May Alsip.

Whether that was the start to the Barnes and Tousley families' habit of jumping the state line, moving back and forth from Cowley County, Kansas, to Kay County, Oklahoma, I don't know. But what I do know is that John and Lillie Barnes became the parents of a long list of progeny, starting with their first bundle of joy in the predictable space of one year after their marriage.

John and Lillie named their firstborn son a memorable name: Sterling Punk Tousley. Like his father before him, Sterling lived most of his life in Cowley County, Kansas, except for the time when he slipped across the state border in 1929 to say those life-changing words to his own sweetheart, Bessie Jane Vaden, in Kay County, Oklahoma.

Still, Sterling lived and died in Cowley County, Kansas, and it seems his children followed his footsteps, as well. It's pretty obvious that this particular branch of Alta's family wouldn't provide a likely candidate in California for her to mail that old postcard to.

Neither would it make sense, if we used the principle of "voice"—determining just who she would have been speaking to when she wrote her notes about "Aunt Nellie." Sterling's family would have been too far removed to have known much about "Aunt Nellie," who would have been his older cousin. Besides, unless she lived past her teen years, she would have been only a dim childhood memory to him, if he recalled her at all.

As a lark in this genealogical quest, I'm simply throwing that name out there in hopes someone snags this page via a search engine query. One never knows.

Back to reality, though, it would be far more productive to query the other Ancestry researchers also working on this Barnes line. Perhaps one of them might know more about the current family members to help put me in touch with a direct descendant who would appreciate receiving the photograph.

That task, however, equates with grunt work—not riveting enough to follow in the minutiae of the details. Thus, until that day when someone calls to claim Alta's memento of her older sisters Nellie and Mollie, I'll tuck that photo away in a safe place and move on to the next discovery from my shopping spree through the antique shops of gold-rush-era California.

Back to Plan B . . . Again

When best-laid plans go awry, there's only one choice for a researcher who wishes to keep going: get back to work on the next best solution. I'm still hoping to return the hundred year old photograph I found in a California antique shop to a descendant of the sisters Mollie, Nellie and Alta Barnes. I just need to find a suitable candidate.

My brilliant idea to contact a fellow family historian via the Ancestry messaging system apparently yielded no results. Granted, it's my impatience that's willing to call it quits on that attempt after only one weekend of waiting. On the other hand, I took another look at the researcher's entry at Ancestry: last logged in "last month" may be warning number one that I won't likely hear from this person any time soon. (Then again, I just checked my own profile; according to Ancestry, it's been four days since I logged in—not!)

So I head on to Plan B.

...er...now, what was that?

I'm less than excited about building out that Barnes family tree for any more generations. This is a family which has stayed close to their hometown, as far as I can tell, making it less likely that one of their descendants became the recipient of the photograph in California. Yes, they did wander from their location in Cowley County, Kansas, but it was only briefly: once, to Kay County, Oklahoma when Alta Barnes was born.

I've since discovered that one of Alta's maternal first cousins (and fellow Kansas resident) also spent time in Kay County, Oklahoma, where he got married, though it was decades after Alta's birth. An important clue, perhaps—until I learned that it's barely a twenty mile hop across the state line to get from one location to the other.

Working my way backwards to the older generation—Alta's parents' siblings—shows that the family was firmly ensconced in their Kansas digs, even back then. And those folks' children stayed close to home, too, once they grew up, married and had children of their own.

I suppose I'll thrash around, banging against even further obstacles in an attempt to locate someone who is close enough to this line to trigger interest in obtaining the photograph of the three sisters. In the meantime, I did discover one cousin with a delightfully different name, whose unique moniker may help me locate something more on the family, so I'll post a bit on that tomorrow. Never underestimate the power of cousin bait on a genealogy blog.

Without any further clues, though, I may have to tuck this photo away in a "hold" file until the day when someone, on a lark, Googles their ancestor's name and wanders through the Internet to find this site. That's just fine, though, because I have several other rescued photographs to share, just waiting in the wings until Alta's photo steps out of the spotlight.

Dashed Hopes and Doldrums

There comes a point in every family history quest when the hapless researcher feels as if the answer to that genealogical question simply isn't out there to be found.

That's where I am, right now.

My hope was to locate one of Alta Barnes' children—who, considering the possible dates of their birth, are quite likely to still be alive. But it appears that is not to be.

Still, Alta's own obituary had mentioned the presence of three grandchildren—not to mention, seven great-grandchildren—and those descendants are surely out there. Somewhere.

How to find them is the question that has stumped me, at least for the time being. Perhaps that answer will show up in the days and weeks to come. But I am not known for my patience. So I keep looking for alternate solutions.

What I'm working on now is going back and checking Ancestry.com's "hints" files to see who else has been researching those lines. Not that I haven't done that before, but long ago, I learned that it never hurts to backtrack and review what we've already done before. You never know when something "new" pops up—"new" because it was really there before, but not to blind eyes that needed to wake up to the fact.

When it comes to Alta Barnes' older sisters, Nellie and Mollie, I still can't find complete vital stats on them—and neither can any of my fellow Ancestry.com-subscribed Barnes researchers. I have an approximate year of birth for both Nellie and Mollie, thanks to the census enumerations, but no clue about any marriages that might bring the research along to find any records of their death—and thus, no telltale obituaries naming their descendants.

The haunting thing about struggling with the lack of information on those two older sisters is the realization that their nicknames might be telling us something. First of all, Mollie could be a nickname—or not. How can I be sure? A combination like "Mollie" and "Barnes" could be quite a false lead, considering how many of them there were in that time period, but assuming Mollie equals Mary, for instance, might become just as misleading a clue as choosing which Mollie Barnes was the right one.

As for the other nickname—Nellie—it struck me last night that Nellie was often used as a nickname for Helen. The problem with this fact is that parents Forrest and Clara Barnes subsequently had another daughter after Alta whom they named Helen. Could they have chosen the re-use of that name as a memorial to Nellie? Had she succumbed, like her older sister Hattie, to that fatal intestinal malady?

At any rate, these seemed to be likely explanations for why I was making no progress in finding any more information on Alta's two older sisters in the photograph. Perhaps that was why Alta—or her own descendant—had written so many notes about "Aunt Nellie." It makes me wonder whether, of the three sisters in the photograph I found, only one of them survived to adulthood—who wanted to insure that her descendants remembered those two missing sisters. From the lack of availability of records, it certainly seems so.

With thoughts like those swirling around in my mind, I began to wonder whether I'd ever be able to return this photo home to family. Getting stuck in those research doldrums can be a joyless sinkhole. That search through the hints file at Ancestry.com may have led to a different answer, though. Just like I had done the first time, I went through each researcher's work, looking to see two things. First, I wanted to find a well-resourced file; someone who does the due diligence of citing sources is serious about learning the truth about their ancestors. Second, though, I checked those pedigree charts to see how far from the "home" person the Barnes relative was.

In some of those pedigrees, the distance between Alta and the researcher's home person was the genealogical equivalent of miles. There's no problem with that, of course—I have put in considerable effort on auxiliary lines in my own trees, as well, with good reason. Though that thorough work represents a passionate family historian, it doesn't necessarily point me towards an immediate descendant who remembers the subjects of the photograph personally. And that was what I was looking for: someone for whom Alta—or Nellie or any of her siblings—was grandma or auntie. Someone close.

It took this review of the researchers to spot it, but I think I've finally found a possibility. I've sent a message, via Ancestry.com, and will hopefully hear from this person over the weekend. If the match is as close as it appears in the pedigree chart, perhaps Alta's memento of her two older sisters will soon find a home. 

Read it in the Newspaper

When researching the lives of our ancestors, we generally head first for those landmark dates on the family timeline: dates of birth, marriage and death. After that, our attention turns to listing the children, and the whole tango starts up again. Birth, marriage and death, and then flip to the next generation.

But what about the lives lived in between those three dates? We can't really get a feel for what our ancestors were like if we limit ourselves to "just the facts, ma'am."

That's when I like to turn to newspapers—especially for those not-so-rich and definitely not-so-famous forebears. For my ancestors fortunate enough to have moved beyond New York City or other major metropolitan areas, hometown newspapers sometimes provide a wealth of knowledge—with a dose of trivia thrown in for good measure.

Now that I'm working on a photo project for someone else's relatives—I'm trying to return an orphaned photograph that I found in a northern California antique shop to the family of Forrest and Clara Barnes—I've found myself stuck with a lack of helpful details. So, I turn to the newspapers, once again.

My first goal was to find any information on where Forrest and Clara Barnes' daughter Alta might have ended up. I found out she was buried back in Cowley County, Kansas, where the family once lived, but I hadn't been able to find an obituary there.

Of course, my first step had been to Google Alta's married name, Williams. With a surname as common as that, I made no progress. Beyond that, I knew there were some other options for free resources for newspaper archives. Granted, Wikipedia provides a list of archives which are accessible online. So does Google News—worldwide.

The trouble is that some lists are so huge as to be nearly useless. And, as you probably noticed, some lists include incredibly delimited collections, such as online resources which only cover a span of ten years, for instance—not terribly helpful when the date needed falls just one year shy of the collection's offerings.

The same drawback applies to the U.S. Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection. As wonderful a resource as it is, the coverage is spotty, both by date and by location. And that's just for newspapers in the United States. A collection like that found via Elephind expands that headache worldwide.

Perhaps that's why some researchers prefer a curated list, but that often comes with a price tag. The Old Fulton New York Post Card site, for instance, has plenty of coverage—and for free, the best news—but its quirky setup and focus on the northeastern United States (and a bit of eastern Canada) can't be of help to everyone.

The comparative convenience may be what draws researchers to subscription services, like NewspaperArchive or Newspapers.com. But even here, people find that the year they are seeking is not included in the holdings, or the small town in Kansas isn't in the collection, making the investment less of a research bargain than once hoped.

I've learned to look for whatever help I can find. That's why I'm impressed with the passionate approach taken by bloggers like Kenneth R. Marks, whose newspaper research lessons take new researchers through the steps on locating targeted relatives, and whose regularly-updated 25,000 hyperlinks to free newspaper resources help convert the overwhelming into the kind of haystack where you just might find that genealogical needle.

While I do subscribe to a few newspaper archival resources, I try first to locate what I'm seeking through a free medium. In Alta's case, though, I just wasn't finding any leads. So I headed to one of those subscription resources—in this case, GenealogyBank—where I finally found what I was looking for.

Still, it was like uncovering a consolation prize. The details weren't extensive. Basically, Alta Barnes Williams died on Saturday, March 7, 1998—but where? The two named survivors were her son, by then moved to Oregon, and her daughter, who lived in Oklahoma. Besides them, there were three unnamed grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. None of them seemed to have a California connection, leaving me still to wonder just how the photograph of Alta and her two sisters might have ended up in that Jackson antique shop.  

Not Finding Alta

Let's face it: if I had been able to find any more useful information on Alta Barnes, the littlest sister in the photo post card I found in a northern California antique shop, this post would have been called, "Finding Alta."

Now you know that I haven't.

Yet.

What I did discover about Alta was that she was born in 1909 in a little town called Newkirk in Oklahoma. Why the family moved from their residence in Cowley County, Kansas, I'm not sure, but for the brief time between the birth of her next oldest sister, Nellie, in 1904, and the loss of her oldest sister Hattie in 1911, the family had shown up in Oklahoma for Alta's 1909 arrival.

Back in Kansas, Alta's family welcomed in two more children—younger sister Helen in 1915 and baby brother James in 1920—before Alta became a married woman, herself. Not quite seventeen, Alta married Webster Wayne Williams in 1925, a man over ten years her senior.

By the time of the 1930 census, she and her husband had moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Webster worked as a mail clerk for the railroad. There they stayed for the next five years, and there they welcomed their first child—a son—into the world.

When their daughter was born in 1936, however, the family was back in Kansas. The 1940 census showed them residing in Johnson County, where Webster was still working as a railroad mail clerk, only this time in the employment of the U.S. Postal Service.

From that point, there was little I could find on Alta Barnes Williams. I learned, thanks to the Social Security Applications and Claims Index, that her middle name was Delila, and that she lived to be eighty nine years of age. I also saw that, in a strange sort of full circle, Alta had returned to the land of her birth, dying—in 1998—in the state of Oklahoma.

In trying to trace what became of her children—in hopes of returning the photograph to family members—I couldn't find much. In fact, I couldn't even locate an obituary for Alta—something not surprising, considering her last residence was in a place with a population less than three thousand people.

After several false hopes—Williams is, after all, a fairly common surname—I did locate a small entry in a Kansas newspaper which was most certainly Alta's obituary. In the process, I was reminded of all the resources available online—both free and fee-based—for searching through newspaper archives, a list which may come in handy for anyone on the same sort of pursuit. This, along with the few facts I gleaned about Alta's family through her obituary, I'll bring up tomorrow.

A Few More Thoughts

Alta Barnes must have been in a chatty mood when she wrote the explanation that accompanied her photograph—the one I found abandoned in an antique shop in Jackson, California. Besides naming the three sisters from Kansas—standing with Alta, there were Mollie and Nellie—and explaining her stomach woes, Alta, or perhaps someone else in the family, had more to say.

What I find to be an unusual remark to include in the label for a family picture was the addition someone—I'm not sure this is the same handwriting as that of the blue inked "stomach ache" comment—had scrawled diagonally across the card:

Aunt Nellie had just got over pneumonia fever. Her hair had fallen out and was growing back.

Sure enough, taking a closer look at the girl Alta had labeled as Nellie, you can see her hair was short—uncharacteristically so for that time period. I'm not sure what, exactly, "pneumonia fever" might have been, nor can I think of any fever so serious as to cause one's hair to fall out. Then again, I'm not a medical expert. Perhaps someone else will know—although, for reasons I explained yesterday, I doubt the malady had anything to do with the flu epidemic that occurred around 1918.

What would have helped even more, in puzzling over this added note, would be to know just who wrote that note. The handwriting wasn't quite the same as the blue inked lines which provided the girls' names. It could have been penned by another relative, or it could have just been a case of the same person's handwriting, many years later.

Whoever it was, either the person writing the note was a niece or nephew of Nellie, or the one being addressed was the niece or nephew. At any rate, we can probably rule out any children of Nellie from the list of possibilities, which is good for one main reason: I can't find any details about Nellie following her entry in the 1920 census.

Meet Nellie, Alta and Mollie

"Seems like I always had the stomach ache," complained the youngest of the three girls posing in a post card from one hundred years ago. If we can trust the handwriting on the back of that post card to be listing the trio from left to right, it was likely Alta Barnes who wrote that note, much later in her life. Just from the looks of it, I'd say the girl on the right was the oldest of the three, and Alta's key confirms that would be Mollie.

Sure enough, from the 1920 census, we can see that the Barnes household of Silverdale township in Cowley County, Kansas, had a daughter Mollie who was born about 1902. Nellie, the next oldest Barnes daughter, would have been born around 1904. And little Alta arrived in 1909—her eleventh birthday was less than a month away when the 1920 census was taken in January.

Not only was there a significant age gap between Alta and her older sisters, but there was another span of almost seven years before the arrival of the next child. Helen Naomi Barnes was born in November of 1915, making me wonder whether the photograph of the three girls below might have been taken before their baby sister's arrival—or at least within the following year or two, before the toddler could photobomb the scene.

The photograph would also have been taken after 1911, the year in which the girls' oldest sister, Hattie Pauline Barnes, had died—else, presumably, Hattie would also have been included in the grouping. Earlier than that date, of course, would also have been unlikely, just based on the appearance of little Alta in the photograph; while she looked young, she was definitely beyond toddler stage, herself, which she wouldn't have been, had the picture been taken while Hattie was still alive.

There was another child who had arrived in the family just after that 1920 census: Forrest and Clara Barnes' son, James. Making his appearance just two weeks after the enumerator stopped by the Barnes household, he not only missed being in this photograph, but also didn't gain himself an entry in the federal census for that decade.

Between those five Barnes children—Mollie, Nellie, Alta, Helen and James—I hoped to trace their descendants onward toward the present to reveal whatever connection there might have been to the antique shop in Jackson, California, where I found the photograph late last year.

That, as it's turning out to be, was too simplistic an expectation.