The Twelve Most Wanted: Ancestor #2

For my second of the Twelve Most Wanted ancestors, my research sights are zeroed in on another maternal line with which I've struggled often during this past year. However, in a nod to the upcoming year of 2020 serving as the centennial of women's right to vote in the United States, rather than focus on my fourth great-grandfather Aaron Broyles, I'd like to zoom in on his wife.

Not Nancy Davis, as those hints in two different genealogy companies assert, but a woman by the name of Frances Reed was the wife of my Aaron Broyles from Anderson County, South Carolina. And that is all I know about her, other than the dates on her barely-legible headstone.

There is one tantalizing connection I did notice, in reading about the extended Broyles and Reed families, though. Remembering A Faithful Heart, the annotated transcription of Emmala Reed's diary from her Civil War years, I know that her father, Judge Reed, was somehow described as an illegitimate son—interestingly—of one of the Broyles men. What his actual connection was with the name Reed, and how that Reed related to Frances Reed, Aaron Broyles' wife, I don't know. But I want to try my hand at figuring that out.

Some of the answers may be dredged up by reviewing A Faithful Heart and all the commentary provided by the diary's editor, Robert T. Oliver, but there are still some assertions which did not appear to link to supporting documentation. Possibly, in some delicate matters, documentation is not to be had, but it would be helpful to see support for the editor's Broyles-Reed paternity contention. These all are—or may be—names which fit handily into my own family tree. My own missing link is the information connecting Aaron Broyles' wife with the rest of the Reed family in Anderson County.

Thus, the second Most Wanted ancestor on my list for 2020 will be Aaron Broyles' wife, Frances Reed. That, along with yesterday's nomination of William Alexander Boothe, represents two out of three potential ancestors to focus on from my mother's family tree. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at my third nomination from her tree, before moving on to my mother-in-law's tree.

Above: "Winter Landscape," oil on canvas by Dutch artist Thomas Heeremans (1641-1694); image courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

  

Finished: Far, Far From Home

Finally, today I had just enough of the leftover sunshine from our waning fall weather to grab a cup of coffee and sit outside to enjoy the last few pages of the book I've been reading.

Well, perhaps "enjoy" is not the best choice of wording for the completion of this collection of Civil War letters home from one Tally Simpson. Spoiler alert: he died at the Battle of Chickamauga. But the editors of this volume handled the last chapter with just the right touch. In their epilogue, they even cast a passing nod to Emmala Reed's journal and her commentary on Fannie Smith—though the editors claimed not being able to identify Fannie Smith or her family in the years after Tally's death.

What the editors did flag for me, though, was a generous helping of footnoted commentary on the many members of Tally Simpson's extended family, many of whom have already taken their place in my mother's online family tree. My next task is to review all these marked passages and insure that the editorial notes provided in the book reflect what I have entered in my official record for this family line. My work is certainly laid out for me there.

The end of one book is seldom the end of a research journey; there is always one more book to be read. As soon as I wrap up the exercise of processing all these notes from the Simpson saga—and glean everything I can on what became of Fannie Smith—I will pick up again with the theme of this small, upcountry hometown of the extended family of my ancestors. There is still more to be read about Old Pendleton and Anderson County, South Carolina.

The End is in Sight . . . Finally!

It's taken me nearly two months—and even then, I can't say I've reached the end. But I've promised myself a coffee date with my book and faithfully kept that date for, well, almost all of those days. Some days, reading just takes longer.

The two months started in early June when, prompted by a suggestion from reader Lisa, who had recommended a book which mentioned some of my ancestors, I actually followed through, ordered the journal and finally started reading. Now, practically two months later, I am within twenty pages of the final sentence in the Reconstruction-era journals of one Emmala Reed of Anderson, South Carolina, A Faithful Heart.

Don't think those twenty pages will breeze by quickly. As Lisa had mentioned to me in conversation over this book, the diarist's entries are hard to read. Emmala Reed wrote in spurts, dashing out phrases about her subject matter, rather than complete sentences. While many of us may speak in that fashion in everyday conversations, having to construct meaning from those phrases, when reading them absent of inflection or pauses, can be confusing; which phrase signifies the end of one thought versus the beginning of the next?

In addition to that unexpected challenge, the editor of the journals, recently-retired history instructor at Coastal Carolina University Robert T. Oliver, provided ample guidance in interpreting not only the steady supply of references to names and incidents, but additional resources for further information through the footnotes on almost every page. Some of the pages were taken up nearly halfway by the footnotes. While I love the many references—you can be sure they are adding to my future reading list—I found myself jumping back and forth between Emmala Reed's journal entries and the footnotes, trying to align the names with the notes.

I might, on some days, sit at my coffee spot for a solid hour of reading, yet barely cover a small section of the book. A twenty page day was a rare event. I finally had to mark the last page with a red flag to give me incentive to keep pushing on.

The constant theme of the journals—basically Emmala Reed's yearlong harangue over her former beau and his abrupt end to their relationship—began to wear on me, as well. It wasn't exactly a gracefully-completed story arc, with any crescendo to a climax, followed by a satisfactory denouement, just the continual drip of commentary about how that unfortunate resolution was immovably a part of her future.

While that theme did wear on me, the pages of her journal treated me to insight on the day to day life of people who turned out to be my relatives—everyone from my third great-grandfather Ozey Broyles, to his disappointment of a son Robert (who incidentally was older brother to my direct line ancestor), to other residents of the town whose names I recognized from my very extended family tree as distant cousins. Robert Oliver's footnotes filled me in on the mesh of relationships and the resources he used to track down further information on each one of those individuals.

Those editorially-provided resources, incidentally, now add to my growing reading list, showing me that it is indeed possible to learn about one's ancestors by immersion in written material about a town, or about a segment of society—like Confederate soldiers from South Carolina, or Reconstruction-era state legislators, or early women of the post-Civil War South. Some of these books I've already purchased and they are awaiting their turn on that growing pile of reading to do; others are, thankfully, available online as public domain territory, saving me a few pennies on that reading budget.

It will take me one more coffee date with Emmala's journals to safely say I've completed the journey. I can't say I've learned much about my second great-grandfather, the younger brother of the jilting Robert Broyles, other than his few cameo appearances as a rather pleasant incidental to the social occasions of that town's history, but I get the distinct impression that the Broyles family as a whole was, in the end, seen through a fairly bitter lens. Of course, I'd love to delve further into whatever behind-the-scenes issues contributed to the rift between the two families—who happened to be relatives, incidentally—and perhaps those reasons will be uncovered by the other recommended resources. But then I need to balance my need to know with a healthy respect for time used versus knowledge to be gleaned by such an investment.

Still, it was interesting to gain a glimpse of the day-to-day life of these relatives, both distant and direct, through the chance rescuing of this set of journals from a garage sale. For me, the time invested in those book-and-coffee getaways was well worth the effort, though I can't say the same for anyone not personally related to the people in the book, other than for curiosity regarding the place or time period. 

Off the Shelf: A Faithful Heart

Finally, finally, I'm opening the cover of the book that includes many mentions of my Broyles ancestors from Anderson County, South Carolina. It's been almost two months since reader Lisa mentioned the title in a comment here. True, it takes a while for books to be ordered and delivered. Then put in line behind other books that need to be read. And, well, cleared from other obligations, conferences, travel plans and...and...and...

I had to make an agreement with myself that if I am ever going to read the books I want to read—meaning, the ones I already own—I will need to make an appointment with myself to work on such a project regularly. As in, every day.

So I make a date with myself to go out for coffee. And bring my book. Sometimes, I also invite my husband to come along; after all, he likewise has a tower of books he really means to read. Or, I'll invite my daughter, now that her teaching schedule has modulated to a dull roar rather than its frenetic full speed jet whine.

The point, of course, is to get some reading done. Isolating a specific spot and a delineated time slot seems to help. And bringing along a book I've been yearning to read is the bonus.

That book, lately, has been A Faithful Heart; The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866. As Lisa has already mentioned, Emmala's journal was full of mentions of the Ozey Broyles family, particularly my third great-grandfather Dr. Ozey's son Robert, whom Emmala considered her childhood sweetheart.

The book's editor, Robert T. Oliver, fills in the many blanks by providing biographical context and historical setting for the Reed journals, for which I am thankful. Not only was Emmala smitten with the young Robert Broyles, but her family was next-door neighbors to the Broyleses. Furthermore, upon realizing the surname of the diarist was Reed, I had wondered whether she was related to the Broyles family through Ozey's mother, whose maiden name was also Reed. (While I am far from finishing the book, I have already uncovered a relationship between the families, but it was not the connection I had assumed it was.)

I particularly value the editorial comments by Robert Oliver, who explained how the journals were found (at a garage sale), why they are so significant historically, and the particular challenges he had to undergo to transcribe them. The rarity of these journals is, in part, owing to the fact that while other diarists concluded their writings at the close of the Civil War, Emmala took up her task at that point, and continued it through the difficult historical period of Reconstruction. Due to the economic pressures increasingly experienced in the south post-war—yet running head-on into the result of that pressure in Emmala's apparent personal need to pour out her anguish on paper—this young woman resolved her dilemma of running out of paper supplies by "cross hatching" her writing. In other words, when she ran out of paper, rather than discontinuing her habit of journaling her daily life, she simply flipped the pages sideways and wrote perpendicularly to her original entries.

As I read through this book, of course the journal entries of Emmala Reed will be most pertinent to my own pursuit of the Broyles family's story. In addition, though, the editorial content will provide a broader perspective to the changing times in that region following the Civil War, something I'm already trying to absorb. Better yet, I've discovered that this book is only one of a series of books called Women's Diaries and Letters of the South, put out by the University of South Carolina Press. Since I'm discovering that the most telling documentation of the social mores of the times seem to be what is revealed in letters and diaries of these very women, I will be perusing the list for other titles to read in this series, as well.

But first, there's a coffee date with a list of books I've promised myself to read. After Emmala's story, there are others...

 
Above: Cover to the book, A Faithful Heart, containing the journals of Emmala Reed. Strangely, though the ISBN on this cover, obtained through Amazon.com, matches the number on my copy of the book, the photos featured on three of the four corners are displayed in reverse of my copy's images. Hopefully, nothing from my copy is omitted from the most up to date copy of this book; I don't want to miss one iota of the details I'm sure to find in Emmala's journals.

When That Face Looks So Familiar

Sometimes, the faces we see in photographs do not have the same look as they did in earlier versions of themselves. Other times, well, if the face still looks familiar, then run with it!

The very answer I was keen to find with the photographs I shared with you yesterday and the day before becomes the crux of the matter with yet another photograph. The older man in Tuesday's photo, who seems to be one and the same as the younger father in Wednesday's picture, is, in my mind, no other than the man in today's portrait of a mature couple taken in South Bend, Indiana.

Could it be the same man? Or am I being too hopeful about identifying a family to whom I can send these abandoned photographs?

If the man we've seen in the past two days' pictures is the same as this man, it makes a lot of sense that he and his wife would have had their picture taken in South Bend. The man and his wife—whom I believe to be George and Elmira Wymer of Marshall County, Indiana—had one daughter, as we've already discussed. This daughter Maude, her husband and her oldest two daughters were likely the younger family posing along with parents George and Elmira in Tuesday's photograph.

Maude's husband, Jesse Reed, apparently died sometime between the 1905 birth of their only son, Loyd, and Maude's subsequent June 1907 marriage to second husband Elbert Harris, a widower living in Michigan. Eventually, the blended family of Maude and Elbert Harris moved to South Bend, where they appeared in the 1910 census.

It would make sense that doting grandparents George and Elmira Wymer would move from their home in Marshall County to live in South Bend near their tragedy-struck daughter during that time period, but especially so upon the arrival of new grandson Franklin Harris in 1909. Then, too, recall the time squeeze in dating these photographs: grandpa George himself passed away in 1912.

If it weren't for what amounts to a timeless facial appearance for that grandfather—added, of course, to the helpful hint on the first photograph, naming Elmira and Maude as part of the Wymer family—I would have been left with three unidentified photographs.

Some people have faces and figures which change as they age. But young or mature, Mr. Wymer's appearance seemed changeless enough to decidedly spot him in all three pictures.

Above: Photograph of George and Elmira Purkey Wymer, taken in South Bend, Indiana, circa 1910. Photograph currently in possession of author until claimed by a direct descendant of the Wymer family.

Family Photograph — Plus Grandkids?

It is not unusual to encounter large families when researching the typical photographs of one hundred years ago. So, for researching one photograph I found in a northern California antique shop, I figured I was looking at mom, dad, and all the kids. There were, in all, eight people in this particular photograph, taken back in Bourbon, Indiana.

The label on the reverse—thankfully, it was a picture to which someone had thought to add names—seemed somewhat confusing. If my guess is right, it looked like someone first wrote, "Elmira's family," and then, as an afterthought, added what looked like the words, "and Maude Wymse."

Although the handwriting was not the same as on the other photographs I had found during that antiquing trip to Sonora, California, I thought there was a good chance that this picture might still be related to the families tied to the other photographs. I had already learned, from researching the Purkey family for the other photos, that Erastus Purkey and his sister Pleasant—whom we discussed last week—happened to have an older sister named Olive Elmira Purkey.

Elmira—as she was labeled in several census records—married a man named George Wymer in Marshall County, Indiana. Records indicate their marriage occurred on February 21, 1878. By the time of the 1880 census, appearing in a household in Bourbon, Indiana, were George and Elmira Wymer, along with their one year old daughter, Maude.

By the time of the photograph I had found—taken in that same Bourbon, Indiana—the family had presumably expanded to include (at least) the eight people showing in the picture. As late as the 1910 census, however, the Wymer family never showed that they had any more than three children—their daughter Maude plus two sons, Charlie and Frank. What was up with that? Did I have the wrong people?

Of course, by the time of the 1900 census, Maude was no longer listed in her parents' family. By then, she, herself, had been married to Jesse Reed in Marshall County in 1897. The Reed household, by then located in Chicago at the time of the 1900 census, included both Jesse and Maude and their two daughters—Elmira and George's first two grandchildren—Donna and Verda.

Could the photo I found include not only George and Elmira Wymer and their two sons, but also their daughter Maude and her husband and two little girls? That would provide the right count. And, since Verda looks like she was still a babe in arms, it would place the time frame for the picture after 1900, the year Verda was born.

Squeezing in the other end of the possible time frame for this picture were three dates. One was the arrival of Jesse and Maude's third baby in 1903. The other occurrence was the death of Jesse, sometime after the birth of their son in 1905 and Maude's subsequent remarriage in 1908. And certainly, the portrait would have had to be taken before the patriarch, George Wymer himself, passed away in 1912.

My guess is that the family got together some time around 1901, back home in Indiana, to capture that photograph of the grandchildren for Elmira and George to have as a keepsake, since those grandchildren would be growing up so far from home. But then, that's if my hunch that this picture includes the Wymers' three children plus their first two grandchildren proves to be correct.

Finding Family

One of the benefits of those old-fashioned genealogical societies is that they gave family history hobbyists an outlet to meet other like-minded enthusiasts. One detraction we find on the other side of the digital divide is that lack of face to face interaction. There are, however, virtual attempts at reconnecting long-lost relatives and facilitating collaboration among distant cousin researchers, and Ancestry.com, for one, has made sure to include such options in their offerings.

When I build a tentative tree for the subjects featured in these abandoned, hundred-year-old photographs I find, I keep an eye out for those Ancestry shaky-leaf hints which show other subscribers who are also researching the same line.

Granted, they can't find me—I'm always careful to mask my research "sandbox" by making the tree private and unsearchable so no one gloms on to my guesses and transforms them into gospel truth by adding them to another tree, unverified. But by paying attention to what other Ancestry subscribers are doing, I can find serious researchers who are carefully constructing their tree through sound reasoning and ample documentation.

While it might be nice to cross check what I am doing with these well-documented trees, what I am really looking for, in this process, is a close family member who might be interested in receiving the actual photograph. It is fairly easy, on a public tree posted at Ancestry, to tell who is a close relative of my photo's subject, and who is someone like me, researching fifth cousins and beyond for the sake of DNA testing or other personal goals. It's those close relatives I'm looking for—someone who not only is particular about the accuracy of their research, but who is also close enough to appreciate the opportunity to receive that relative's picture.

But now we come to the photo of Henry with John Reed's daughter. Henry who? And which daughter? Do I even have the right John Reed? These are questions that plague me as I try to determine whether enough work has been done to send this little treasure home to family.

For one thing, I had to make the choice between two men. Knowing how much less people cared about precise spelling of names in that era of time, it was quite possible that either of two men with similar names could be the right one: John Holmes Reed, a teacher and farmer from the outskirts of Guelph, or John Read, the machinist from the north ward of the city.

Then there was the consideration of which of John Reed's (or Read's) daughters would be the right one. John Read's older daughter seemed a bit too old, yet his younger one too young. John Reed, the farmer from Erin Township, had two older daughters, either of whom could have qualified as the woman in the photograph.

The added benefit was the demonstrated connection to California—location where I finally found the photo, over one hundred years later—where John Reed's brothers had several descendants take up residence.

While I'm still not sure which Henry was the right identity for the man in the photograph, we do know that the woman in the picture was one of John Reed's daughters. Since the most helpful Reed family tree I found on Ancestry belonged to a direct descendant of John Reed, himself, it seemed the most reasonable choice to send the photograph to this descendant, who, incidentally, is interested in receiving it.

So, despite the remaining doubts, off this photo goes to its new home across the border, where a descendant of the only one whose first and last name were provided in the photo's inscription will gratefully add it to the family's records of their heritage.

Never-Ending Research

Just at the point at which I was going to call it quits and stop puzzling over that mystery photograph from Guelph, Ontario, the ongoing conversation with the Reed family researcher I found via Ancestry brought up one more question: what about James Henry Reed's daughter Victoria Ellen?

James Henry Reed was the one Reed brother I had mentioned yesterday in that litany reciting the universe of possible Henrys to be the subject in the hundred year old photo I found. James Henry Reed's son—eligible on account of his name being Henry—I had already dismissed out of hand because he was married by the time our mystery photograph may have been taken. My reasoning was that it would be unlikely for this Henry to sit for his photograph with another woman—even if she was a cousin—because he was already married.

While that was a valid point, it was only true up until 1898, when that Henry Reed's first wife died. Between that date and 1904, the date of his second marriage, he was a widower. If the photograph was taken at the later end of our possible date range, it could have been this Henry who was featured in the photograph with our unnamed daughter of John Holmes Reed.

What makes that an interesting possibility is that this Henry—just like another of his cousins we had been considering—had a sister who moved to California.

The only problem with that realization: those Ancestry subscribers who include this sister in their family tree have noted the wrong California county in their records.

Hoping that the full date of death provided in some Reed family trees on Ancestry was correct, I entered the woman's first name only—those records all had her listed as still unmarried—and searched in California with the exact date of death. Then, with the search result showing a possible married woman with the same first name, I turned to newspaper archives to locate any obituaries under that exact name which might help determine whether that married woman was the same as the person I knew only by her maiden name.

With that, I discovered some interesting clues about Victoria Ellen Reed, this Henry's sister and daughter of James Henry Reed of Ontario, Canada. Victoria had married an Englishman by name of Fred Herring. For a while, they lived in Minnesota—long enough to add four children to their family—and then they headed to California.

What is interesting about this couple is that they were considered "early settlers" of the area in which they made their home in California—the small town of Rio Linda which, today, is just across the state highway from the Sacramento airport. Furthermore, as an echo of Victoria's grandfather, her husband served as Rio Linda's postmaster.

Of their two surviving children, Fred and Victoria left a daughter, Bertha, and a son, William Reed Herring. Bertha, in her younger years, served as a teacher in Turlock, California, not far from where some cousins eventually settled. Her brother, known as Reed, moved to Truckee in the employment of one of the railroad companies, but eventually joined the National Guard and could be spotted in newspaper articles mentioning his location in various northern California cities.

Whether either of these two surviving children of Fred and Victoria Herring ever inherited a copy of the photograph of—maybe—their uncle Henry Reed, I can't be sure. All I know is that it makes more sense for the Canadian Henry in the mystery photograph to be associated with a family member who had connections in northern California. After all, that's where I found the photo, over one hundred years later.

More Henrys

They don't call it an exhaustive search for nothing.

As we try to figure out the puzzle of just which Henry Reed might have been seated next to John Reed's unnamed daughter in a photograph taken in Guelph, Ontario, in the late 1800s, we discover there are more options to consider than we'd like to see. We've already considered the son of John Reed himself, a man named John Henry Reed—and discarded this possibility because, in comparison to his older sisters, he was younger-looking than the relatively older appearance of the man in the photo.

We've considered the spouses of John Reed's daughters Lavinia and Mary, and even their baby sister Nellie—but none of these daughters married men named Henry.

We've begun on the jump up to the next generation, to see who might have been a cousin to John Reed's daughter. So far, we're not quite sure about Henry Easton, son of John Reed's sister Francis, despite the fact that two of this Henry's sisters later moved to California, where I eventually found the photograph in an antique store. Besides, Henry had homesteaded in Nebraska, and though he was a single man at the time, it is doubtful that he would have returned to Guelph during the time span in which the picture was taken.

Francis, however, was not the only possibility for parent of a child named Henry. John and Francis had an older brother named Henry, who, predictably, named his own son Henry. This Henry, born in 1851, would have been in his late thirties by the time of the picture with John Reed's daughter. However, by that point, that Henry would also have been married and father of at least five children of his own, hardly a likely candidate for a pose with a single woman, cousin or not.

Not to lose hope on this survey of eligible Henrys. There were other candidates. Take, for instance, the fact that John, Francis and Henry had another sibling whose middle name was Henry. That man—named James Henry Reed—also had a son whom he named Henry. Born about 1854, that Henry, also, was married by the time of our mystery photograph, making him another unlikely candidate among all these potential cousins named Henry.

Well, how about another sibling? There was an abundant supply, thanks to John Reed's parents. What about his sister Margaret? She, too, named a son Henry. Born in 1858 in the same Erin Township where John Reed's family lived, if only this son of Margaret and her husband Gideon Awrey had married a decade later, we might have been able to consider a possible match between him and his cousin implied by our mystery photo. But no, this Henry was married by 1883—at the closest, three years before the first possible date of the photograph—making it unlikely that he would sit for his picture with a different woman, even if she was his cousin.

There is, however, one more Henry. Reed brother Robert Alexander also had a son who might—if he preferred using his middle name to his first name—have qualified for our mystery Henry. This son of Robert was born later than all the other Henrys, in 1867. He was, by the possible date of the photograph, likely unmarried, as he didn't tie the knot with Lydia Martha Johnston until 1893. Despite that promising detail, there is one problem with this possibility: with his date of birth in 1867, he would have been only a few years older than either Lavinia Reed (born in 1872) or her sister Mary (born in 1875). Unless he aged prematurely, his appearance would likely have not given that same sense of age difference as we can see in the photo.

After all those considerations, despite all that information, it seems the most likely candidate—at least, solely by the numbers—would have been Henry Easton, son of John Reed's sister Francis and her husband George Easton. It would have been serendipitous if we could have found a diary, or another photograph, or even a newspaper report that Henry Easton had returned to Guelph for a family visit, or at least found record of a border crossing from his homestead in Nebraska to his childhood home in Ontario.

But we didn't. And that leaves us, lacking such intel, still wondering whether this was the Henry identified by the enigmatic note on the back of a hundred year old photograph which ended up in an antique store in the foothills of northern California.

Twin Tales

Had I mentioned that Nellie Reed, our original candidate for identity of the woman in our mystery photo, had a twin? (Made me take a look back at my own posts. The answer: yes.)

While we've since discarded the possibility that the woman in that photograph from Guelph, Ontario, might have been Nellie, we're about to see an echo of that history of twins in today's exploration of who our subject might have been. Not for the subject, this time, but for the person who might have been the "voice" behind the inscription we found on the reverse of the picture.

Yesterday, I wondered whether the photograph might have been passed along by a sibling of the subject's father. Remember, all we know about this young woman was that her father was named John Reed. We are presuming that he lived in the area around Guelph, since that was where the photograph was taken. Fortunately for us, there was a man named John Reed in that vicinity.

Yesterday, we explored whether the photo had been passed along in the hands of John's sister Frances, who not only had a son named Henry (one helpful criterion), but a daughter, Hattie, who eventually moved to northern California, where the photograph was found, over one hundred years later.

Unfortunately, some of the details led us to consider this a slim possibility for the identity of Henry. But before I leave that consideration, one more item popped up: Hattie had a twin. And her twin had moved to California, as well.

Hattie's twin was named Nettie. Both were born on September 29, 1878. Although they were born in Nebraska, far from our original location of Guelph, Ontario, they were of an age to be just a few years younger than either Lavinia or Mary Reed, the two possibilities we're now considering for the identity of the woman seated next to Henry in that photo I found in northern California.

Nettie's side of this twin story was that she married a man named David Frew. Originally from Illinois, David and his family moved to Nebraska by the time he was ten, leading him, a decade later, to the location where he met and married Nettie.

Sometime before the U.S. 1920 census, the Frew family moved to a warmer climate, settling in the Los Angeles area in southern California. Not until late in life did the couple move up to northern California—actually, to the county just south of me—possibly to follow one or more of their grown children.

Once again, that creates a possible line of inheritance located in the region where I eventually found the abandoned photograph. After all, that photo from the mid-1880s to mid-1890s had to find its way to northern California somehow.

The aspect of "voice"—detecting the point of view incorporated in the explanation written on the photo's reverse—also seems compelling. If, say, Nettie were writing that explanation to one of her children, she would, of course, refer to her brother simply as "Henry."

In attempting to identify the person sitting with her brother, so many years before—and especially if she were doing so in her own old age—she might have forgotten which of her cousins the woman might have been. Lavinia? Or Mary? After all, even if they were her contemporaries, she grew up in a place over one thousand miles removed from the old family home in Guelph.

On the other hand, it would have been easier for such a woman to remember the name John Reed. Though John resided in Guelph, himself, his son—also named Henry—eventually moved west, as well. That Henry, though, never crossed the border, settling first in Saskatchewan, and eventually in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In that latter location, Henry's father—the original John Reed—paid him a visit when the elder Reed took ill and died. Perhaps news of that family event, in 1943, would have been enough to keep his name fresh in the mind of whoever wrote the note on the back of the photograph I found in northern California.

Still, as we mentioned yesterday, the fact that Nettie's brother Henry lived and died in Nebraska interjects enough doubt into the twin version of this scenario that it outweighs the possibility of the picture having been passed down through either of this twin California branch of the family. We'll need to take a look at the other possibilities for Henry before we reach a final conclusion as to who the Henry in our mystery photograph was. And yes, such an exercise may prove exhaustive.

Seems Plausible

We're still puzzling over just who that Henry was who sat for his portrait with an unnamed woman identified as "cousin" and "John Reed Daughter." Having some help from a descendant of that same John Reed doesn't hurt, of course, so let's look at the hints he provided for possibilities.

A prime candidate might be the son of John Reed's sister, Francis Ann. For this man, born in 1851 in Ontario, we can check off the prime requirement: his name was, indeed, Henry. Since we had figured the photograph, from the Burgess and Son photography studio in Guelph, Ontario, was taken sometime between the mid 1880s and mid 1890s, that would put our possible Henry at an age range of thirty five to forty five. That seems to fit nicely with appearances.

This Henry, son of Francis Ann and George Easton, had another qualification: he was single. That little detail might tempt us to think someone was up to some matchmaking, in singling out an unmarried daughter of John Reed, to pair up with for this photograph. And don't let that cousin status alarm you; it was not unusual for cousins to marry, back in that era.

Another interesting thing about this particular Easton family is that Henry Easton's youngest sibling—nearly thirty years younger than he—happened to marry and eventually move to northern California. And that sibling—her name was Hattie—had several children, one of whom ended up with a Find A Grave burial record showing his final resting place to be in Contra Costa County, California.

That location may not mean much, for those who haven't been following these photo-rescuing escapades at A Family Tapestry. But you may recall that several of the photos I've found in northern California antique shops seem to link back to a family member in Contra Costa County. It's likely that a wholesale provider of antique photos is the one located in that county, rather than simply that these family members lived there, but that's the suspected route I think many of the photographs I've found have taken. And here, with Henry's photo, we have another possibility of a nexus with the Contra Costa County supplier.

There's only one problem with this scenario: Henry Easton didn't live in Guelph at the time this photograph was taken. In fact, he didn't live anywhere in Ontario. Forget a Canadian address any time after the U.S. 1880 census, where we can find him, a single man, living in Dawson County, Nebraska. In fact, a Find A Grave volunteer posted a transcription of his obituary from 1904, indicating that he and other Easton family members had homesteaded in Nebraska in the 1870s.

Never mind that the pathway in California made sense, considering our other rescue experiences. Unless Henry Easton made a trip back to Guelph to visit family sometime after settling, pioneer style, out in Nebraska, it is doubtful this would be the right Henry, single or not.

Oh, Henry

It's hard enough to read some sense into a cryptic label slapped on the back of an old photograph, but doubly frustrating when enigmatic phrases get interpreted the wrong way. In the case of our current mystery photograph from Guelph, Ontario, we've been trying to locate the daughter of someone named John "Reed" and then see if she had any connection with someone named Henry.

The verdict on this approach? I'll give you the Reader's Digest version: it isn't working.

The photograph whose subjects we're trying to identify came with a two-line explanation. The first line said simply, "Henry + cousin." A second line followed up, just as unhelpfully: "John Reed Daughter."

We've already tried our hand at locating a possible John Reed in or near Guelph during the approximate time of the photograph (the 1890s). We've discovered two such men in Wellington County: one named John Reed (alternately spelled Reid) and another named John Read. Each had daughters of an age to approximate the youthful appearance, in the 1890s, of our unnamed subject. Yet none of these candidates had a connection to an older brother or husband whose name was Henry.

That observation was enough to provide the nudge to take the label on the back of the picture more literally. It's not enough to look for a candidate for daughter of John Reed. The relationship needs to be fixed with Henry, not John Reed's daughter. And the woman sitting next to our mystery Henry needs to have been either his cousin or daughter of his cousin John.

Normally, I would have taken the time to examine both Johns' family trees, pushing back another generation to find any cousin candidates for the enigmatic Henry. However, this time, I discovered a shortcut: there was a well-researched family tree on Ancestry.com for the more likely of the two John Reeds.

Of course, sending a letter out of the blue always runs the risk of being ignored—but then, again, sending that note to someone on Ancestry means, at least, that I'm talking to a fellow family history fan. It's more likely I'd receive a response there than, say, through Facebook Messenger.

So I reached out to a relative of John Holmes Reed, the former teacher and (sometimes) farmer from Erin Township, that twenty mile drive from the city of Guelph. I asked, among other things, whether this descendant might either have photos of John Reed's children, or at least have connections with other extended family members who might have those coveted photos.

While my newfound Reed contact did not know of any specific photos of the daughters, he did treat me to a rundown of the possibilities for cousin connections to John's two older daughters, Mary and Lavinia. Here's his thinking:

John Holmes Reed had eight siblings. One of these siblings was named Henry, who named one of his sons Henry Reed (born 1851)....a sister Francis Ann, who named one of her sons Henry G. Easton (also born 1851), and another sister Margaret who also named one of her sons Henry Awrey (born in 1858), and a brother Robert Alexander who had a son he named James Henry Reed (1867). So "cousin" Henry or brother Henry could have been any of these Henrys. 

As for the woman in the photograph, this Reed descendant weighed in: "I suspect that it may be Lavinia or Mary Reed."

There, with one simple email, a family member provided me a lightning-quick tour of the Reed family tree, saving me the time of looking down each of eight branches of the tree to which John Holmes Reed was connected.

Of course, I couldn't just leave it at that. You know I always wonder how a photograph made it from its origin, so far away from California, to the point at which I located it in an antique shop in Gold Rush country. Taking this Reed family member's suggestions, I started examining the descendants of each of the Henrys, and something popped up that caught my eye: another connection to the Contra Costa area where so many others of the pictures I've found originated.

Above: Closeup of a man identified only as Henry, from a photograph taken, circa 1890, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Photograph found in antique store in Jackson, California; currently in possession of author until claimed by a descendant of this family.

Another Step Backwards

When the records aren't quite clear enough to provide an adequate snapshot of a given family's constellation, in genealogy, we opt to step backwards in time, to see the view from a different perspective. In the case of the mystery photograph we're currently studying, we used that very technique in considering the possibility that the unnamed woman was daughter of John Read of Guelph, Ontario. When his entry in the 1881 census didn't provide the names of all his children, we took a step back in time to see what we could learn from the 1871 census.

Of course, I tried the same approach in studying the other candidate for the John Reed mentioned on the back of the photograph. Though he was easily found in the 1891 census, I couldn't find his family in the 1881 census. I even tried looking for alternate spellings, including Reid, but nothing turned up for me.

Thankfully, last Thursday, reader Jackie Corrigan, a blogger herself at As Canadian as can be, helpfully commented,

You have probably found this by now. The family is in the 1881 census with the surname spelt Reid. There are two daughters, Levina and Mary, who would be the right age.

Well, no. Actually I hadn't already found that tidbit. But I wasted no time in looking it up.

I did so with one proviso: since already searching for John Reid did me no good, this time I tried my search using the more unusual of the two daughters' names. Levina became my touchstone. Heading to the 1881 census, I found her, exactly as Jackie had spelled it. There she was, along with her father John and mother "Margret." Perhaps this was proof enough that someone had a different approach to spelling.

Lavinia, as her name turned out to be spelled in her birth record, was born to John Holmes Reid and Margaret Jane Grasley on 15 May 1872. By the time she was eighteen, she was married—but not to anyone named Henry, as the inscription on our mystery photo led us to hope. Her husband's name, according to that 1890 record, was actually Alexander Lindsay.

Still, there was her sister Mary. Perhaps she would be our photogenic subject. Born Mary Matilda Reid in 1875, by the time she was seventeen, she was a married woman. She, also, did not marry anyone by the name of Henry, proving yet another disappointment on this desperate search for identity. Mary became the bride of William Theaker on February 25, 1891, in Mimosa.

Once again, that persistent researcher's stubborn trait leads me to hope for another break. Maybe that inscription on the back of the photograph was really telling it like it was, when it noted, "Henry + cousin." Tomorrow, let's see if John Reed's daughters had any cousins who were named Henry.

On Canada Day

While Canada Day is officially the designation for July 1, the holiday having fallen on a Sunday means the country celebrates today. While I'm happy for our neighbors to the north during this festive celebration, I'm anxiously awaiting the return to business as usual at the museums and libraries across the border.

Why? I'm still searching for clues as to just who the John Reed might have been whose unidentified daughter had her likeness taken at a photography studio in Guelph, Ontario, nearly 120 years ago. While it seems we need to rule out the two candidates for the identity of our man John Reed, I thought there might be some other avenues we could explore in this adventure.

For one thing, Guelph has a few repositories tasked with preserving the city's memories, and I'm hoping to find a helpful staff member who might guide me further in this identification process—after the holiday, of course.

There is the Guelph Historical Society, which provides a search page to locate specific items in their collection. Remember my second candidate for the true identity of the "John Reed" mentioned in the photograph? The man named John Read in the 1881 census happened to have a son named Clement. Just searching for that spelling—John Read—brought up this set of photographs with a possible shot of Clement, himself.

The other John Reed was mentioned in a different collection, found through the Wellington County Museum and Archives. My hopes were certainly raised when I found their online access included a collection of postcards, but alas, neither John Read nor John Reed were included in that set. Still, it was fun to look through.

But John Reed was found elsewhere in the midst of all that collection's details, included in a set of land records for Erin Township. Sure enough, that was the same John Reed we found in the 1891 census record. We just don't know—yet—whether that was the John Reed mentioned on the back of our photograph.

If all else fails, once the holiday is over, I can always contact the Guelph Public Library. In this age of budget cutbacks, genealogical researchers sometimes forget to just ask. We presume the answer, in the face of no money for frills, will always be "no," but that is not always the case. It is always free to ask. It's only the answer that sometimes costs money.

While, behind the scenes, I'll continue to build family trees for our two candidates—John Reed and John Read—I'll also be awaiting any responses from these archives and collections which might provide some hints from already-stored and identified photographs. That might help.

Even if that fails, though, there was one other suggestion from last week which turns out to offer a promising lead—but that will take some explaining...tomorrow.

A Reed by any Other Spelling

The note on the back of the abandoned photograph started out, "Henry + cousin" but then stopped. A second line continued, "John Reed" and then added the additional term, "Daughter." That was all I could find on that picture taken in Guelph, Ontario at a photography studio called Burgess and Son.

By style of photograph and by style of hair and clothing, all indicators pointed to a portrait taken in the 1890s. Especially considering the woman's hair with its frizzy bangs, it was likely a style from the 1890s, noted for short hair framing the face and treated to the heat of steel tongs "heated over an alcohol lamp or a gas jet" to "make the waves more lasting."

But a photo taken in the mid 1890s of a woman with such a hairstyle would not do for a target subject known to be born just a few years before in 1885. The daughter of the only John Reed I could find in the region surrounding Guelph would have been a mere child during that decade. And, just based on the fluffy hairstyles of the next decade with its Gibson Girl ideal, it is doubtful that the picture I found would have been taken in the early 1900s.

So, goodbye to the notion that the subject of the photograph I found in a northern California antique shop would have been Nellie Reed, wife of Kenneth Quarrie of Wellington County, Ontario. She was simply too young to be a likely candidate.

So who else was there in the region surrounding the city of Guelph who could have been a daughter of John "Reed"? This is where we need to get creative with our spelling. One obvious choice would be to search for the alternate—and common—spelling, Reid. However, no candidates from that time period offered themselves for consideration.

There was, however, a man by the name John Read. This resident of Guelph was listed in the 1881 census. Most promising was the fact that he did have a daughter, who at that point was twenty years of age. Since our mystery photograph was taken at the Burgess and Son studio some time between the mid 1880s and the 1890s, this daughter would have been just the right age to qualify as our subject.

That, unfortunately, was where the case begins to unravel itself. While this daughter—her name was given as Kate G. in the 1881 census—did happen to have a brother, his name was not Henry, as was mentioned in the inscription accompanying our photograph. Kate's brother's name was Clement.

Of course, the man in the picture with this daughter of "John Reed" could have been a husband, rather than a brother. But taking a look forward in time to reveal Kate's life story, we discover she remained single until the point of her death in 1935. No Henry awaiting us in any such possibility.

Stepping in the opposite direction, though, shows us another possibility. If we find the household of John Read in 1881 to include only two children—Kate and her brother Clement—what could we find if we took a step backwards in time?

It turns out that John Read and his wife Ann had two older children who had, by 1881, left their parents' household. And one of those older children was indeed another daughter. Her name was Emma, and while she was born in 1856, a youngish-looking thirty-something woman could still be a possibility for our photo subject.

Looking for the other telltale signs of a match, though, also brings disappointment. Emma's other brother was also not a Henry; John and Ann's oldest son was named Walter. And though it was encouraging to see that this daughter had gotten married, we discover it was not to someone named Henry. The man Emma married in 1876 was named Denis Cross.

Whoever Henry was in the photograph I found, I am not sure I will be able to identify—at least, not if I assume that the woman seated by his side was John Reed's daughter and either a sister or a wife. Perhaps the next step will be to take the label literally and assume that Henry was sitting next to his cousin, John Reed's daughter. That, of course, will require building these trees out yet another generation.

Above: The John Read family in Guelph, Ontario, in the 1871 Canadian census; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Could This be Nellie?

Now that we have isolated a possible identity for our mystery woman in the photograph from a northern California antique shop, let's see what can be found about her story.

The hint on the back of the photograph had only identified her as John Reed's daughter. Since the picture was taken at a photography studio in Guelph, Ontario, our first step was to locate any possible resident in the area claiming that name—and then see if he had a daughter.

This we have already done for one John H. Reed who lived about a twenty mile drive from Guelph in a tiny hamlet in the township of Erin called Mimosa. Finding him in the 1891 Canadian census, we learned that he had a daughter named Nellie—and not only that, but a son called Henry, just like the name of the man in the photograph.

The only drawback to this scenario was that Nellie, at the time of the 1891 census, was only six years of age. For her to have been the young woman in the photograph, it would likely mean the picture was taken well into the early 1900s—possible, but not plausible.

Still, by the time I had researched this Nellie, I had become attached to her story, and couldn't dream of moving on to other possibilities without at least telling you something about who she was.

Nellie Reed was actually named Ellen at birth, back on April 6, 1885. On that date, she arrived complete with her very own playmate: a sister named Maggie May. The twins were listed as born to John Holmes Reed, a teacher, and Margaret Jane Grasley.

Nellie's next appearance on the paper trail was at the occurrence of her marriage to Kenneth Christopher Quarrie of Garafraxa. At the time, she was eighteen and he was ten years her senior.

By the time of the 1921 census, she was listed as Ellen, wife of Kenneth Quarrie, a farmer in West Garafraxa Township in Wellington County. She was now mother of four: three sons and one ten year old daughter, the youngest of the family.

The next record I found of Nellie was not for many years after that point in her timeline. After her passing in 1965—nearly twenty years after her husband—a headstone was erected at the Johnson-Eramosa Union Cemetery in Wellington County, Ontario. Duly recorded at Find a Grave, a clearer photograph of the monument's inscription can be found at the Canada GenWeb Cemetery Project.

Though I looked for such a serendipity, no photograph of Nellie, herself, accompanied the entry at Find a Grave. In fact, the search prompted me to scour family trees posted at Ancestry.com in hopes that someone had included a photograph of Ellen Reed Quarrie. But no. Not one sign of what she might have looked like.

Still, the fact that this daughter of John Reed would have been so young at the time our mystery photograph would have been taken makes me doubt that Nellie was the right identity for the woman in the picture. Despite marrying a man ten years her senior—similar to the appearance of the couple in the photograph—we already know the photograph's other subject was supposed to be named Henry, not Kenneth. And yes, I even went back to look at the handwriting, in case the H was really a sloppy K.

Since this John Reed was the only one by that name I could find from that time period in the Guelph area, we probably need to go back and look for any possible suspects whose names would be phonetically the same. After all, spelling was not the forte of many people. The name could have been spelled any number of different ways—by census enumerators, by directory publishers, or even by the person writing that note on the back of the photograph. We'll need to revisit this puzzle to see if there were any men named John whose surname was spelled Reid or Read. Maybe that will be the key to unlock this mystery.

No, His Wife's Name was Not Mimosa

I was quite excited, if you recall, to discover that the John Reed I had found in the Wellington County, Ontario, directory came with a middle initial H. Why? Because H, in my hopes, would equate to the given name Henry. And the hundred year old photograph I had found in an antique shop in northern California had a note indicating that the man in the photo was named Henry. I fervently hoped this man in that city directory preferred to go by his middle name.

However, when I found my possible John Reed in directories for the area indicated by the photography studio's location—the city of Guelph in Ontario, Canada—it turned out there were other details I needed to discover.

For one thing, in American city directories, it was common, during that era, to list the husband's name followed by the wife's given name in parentheses. An example would be this 1934 city directory for Tampa, Florida, where my great grandfather, a dentist, had his office:

Notice Rupert C. McClellan's wife's name (Sarah A.) in parentheses.

When it comes to reading directories north of the border, however, that rule doesn't stand. Take a look how John H. Reed's entry was printed.

My first assumption, from years of experience, would have been to understand Mr. Reed's wife's name to be Mimosa. An unusual name, to be sure, but not an entirely impossible choice for her doting parents' precious baby daughter.

As it turned out, a good look around at the page in the directory which included John Reed's name revealed that quite a few men of that era seemed to have chosen, as their life's companion, a woman with the same name: Mimosa.

Perhaps, if you found that discovery as unusual as I had, you would then be prompted to flip to the front of the book and see what could be found to orient you to the details of the abbreviated entries to follow. And there, as I had, you would learn not only what claimed its rightful place within those parentheses, but also to what details the "con 1, lot 27" entry referred.

Explanations to Directory:

Directory is arranged as follows;--1. Name of individual or firm. 2. Post

Office address in parenthesis. 3. Concession and lot on which the

party resides. 4. Occupation.

Figures placed after the occupation of farmers, indicate the number of

acres of land owned or leased by the parties.

John H. Reed, a resident listed in the section of the 1884 Wellington County directory for a place called the Township of Erin, actually lived in a tiny place called Mimosa. This hamlet, as it was called at the time, turned out to have an interesting history, one which was intertwined with the Reed family history as well.

Though originally settled by the British and, in particular, the Irish in the 1820s, Mimosa didn't appear as a separate geographic entity until residents of the area lobbied for their own post office in the late 1850s. When the request was granted by the postal authorities in 1860, the first postmaster named to the new Mimosa post office was a man by the name of Henry Reed. This Henry and his wife, Ann Holmes Reed, were the parents of twelve children, youngest of whom was named John Holmes Reed.

That John Holmes Reed—the very same John H. Reed we've spotted in the Erin Township directory from 1884—turned out, as the directory indicated, to have land labeled as concession 1 and lot number 27, located within that tiny hamlet known at the time as Mimosa.

Yes, the H turned out to represent the name Holmes, not Henry as we had hoped. His wife's name, rather than Mimosa, was actually a more pedestrian Margaret.

Above: Clipping from the Wellington County, Ontario, marriage records for John Holmes Reed and Margaret Jane Grassley dated 20 September 1871; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Spouse? Or Sibling?

Sometimes, hints given turn out to be much more enigmatic than hoped. When I found a cabinet card of a couple with an inscription on the reverse, at first I thought it provided enough information to allow me to return the photograph to descendants of the people featured in the portrait. The more I puzzled over the clue—"Henry + cousin John Reed Daughter"—the less I found to like about its helpfulness.

Fortunately, this photo I found in northern California did include an embossed studio name for the photographer: Burgess and Son. Their location was listed as Guelph, a city in Ontario, Canada. As we saw yesterday, the first time that studio used the name Burgess and Son was in 1886—although technically, the city directory identified the establishment as William Burgess and Son. By 1889, the first name had been dropped and the studio started going by the name Burgess and Son. This continued at least through 1900, the last city directory for Guelph I could locate online.

Meanwhile, the popularity of the cabinet card format for photography was waning. That design still continued to be produced in the 1890s, but after the early 1900s, was soon forsaken for other formats.

Equipped with that knowledge, I set out to find an entry for someone named John Reed in the Guelph city directory. I located one man by that name—at this point, I'm trying only for that specific spelling, but will eventually branch out to other possible spelling variants in this search—whose name happened to include a middle initial: John H. Reed.

Hmmm...that middle initial looked quite promising, but I reserved judgment on possibilities until I could locate this John Reed in a census record. After all, it wasn't John Reed who was in that photograph, but John Reed's daughter. The census record would reveal whether this John Reed could still be in the running as candidate for our subject's father.

Since the city directory in which I found this John H. Reed was for the year 1884, I looked for the next census enumeration to locate our possible John Reed's household. Sure enough, there was a John Reed in the 1891 Canadian census. A promising start: just as had the John Reed in the 1884 city directory, this John Reed lived in the township of Erin—now an entity swallowed up within the town of Erin. The best part? He did have a daughter.

The problem begins when I realize the daughter's age. In 1891, she was listed as being six years of age—hardly the age of the woman in our antique photograph.

But could she have been sixteen years of age in our photograph? Perhaps this could have been a picture taken ten years later. She did look young in the photograph. I'm just not sure it was that young.

Another tidbit from the 1891 census: this daughter of John Reed had an older brother. He happened to be five years older than this John Reed's daughter, whose name was Nellie. And you'll love this discovery: her brother's name happened to be Henry.

Could this be the Henry listed in the photograph? Is this Henry seated next to his sister? And here I had been thinking the Henry in the picture was seated next to his wife.

Still, it seems to be somewhat of a push to make these details fit the scenario behind that label on the back of the photograph. I really need to look for alternative candidates.

Over 21 Wyndham

It's time to tinker with the local city directories to see just how long the photography studio known as Burgess and Son was in business in the city of Guelph, Ontario. Our goal: determine a date range for the picture found in a northern California antique shop with the enigmatic label "Henry + cousin John Reed Daughter."

My thinking is that, once we determine that date range, we can estimate the date of birth of the woman in the photograph and, assuming she is John Reed's daughter, look for that family constellation in the Canadian census for the nearest decade.

Simple, right? Don't be too sure.

Let's look, today, at what can be found about the business establishment known as Burgess and Son. Thanks to a modest inclusion of Wellington County directories in the collection at Ancestry.com, I was able to find a listing for that specific photography enterprise as early as the year 1886. The entry reveals that the studio was located "over 21 Wyndham" in the city of Guelph. It also alerts us to the fact that the senior Burgess was named William.

Before that point, William Burgess was listed in the city directory at that same business location, but only under his own name. At least, that's how I found the listing for 1884 and 1883.

Of course, that could just be how that particular publisher printed out their directories. I couldn't find any different section with a classified directory, so that hampers our quest for isolating the dates the business was in operation specifically under that name, Burgess and Son.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was able to locate their listing in 1889, in 1891, in 1895, in 1896, and even in 1900. After that, despite that particular Ancestry collection stating it went up to 1906, I couldn't locate any directories specific to Guelph. For all I know, Burgess and Son could have been in operation for decades after that.

That open-ended scenario, at least for our purposes, may not hamper our search by much, as the type of photographic design—the cabinet card style—was not continued for long after that point. We may be safe in assuming the couple sat for their likeness any time between the establishment of the business name after 1884 and any time up through the turn of that century. Still, that's a span of over fifteen years.

Next on our research plan will be to find a family of someone in Guelph named John Reed—or, gasp, any one of several spelling permutations—which includes a daughter who would be at least approaching her twenties sometime between 1885 and 1900. Or beyond.

And then? Hope fervently that that daughter became the bride of a man named Henry.

With variables like that, what are my chances?

   
Above: Entry for Burgess & Son photography studio in the Guelph city directory in 1891; image courtesy Ancestry.com.