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.

The Early Bird and Platitudes Like That

I don't suppose, if you were among the many, yesterday morning, shut out of online registration for next January's Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, that you would enjoy reading my post today. Procrastinator that I am, I took a cue from an experience gleaned from an entirely different stage of life, to insure that I was not one of those who were put on the wait list for classes in Salt Lake City.

Back when my husband and I decided to homeschool our daughter—yes, including her entire high school career—there were several instances where timely registration made all the difference in whether someone got to "play" at tournaments. Our daughter was on the local debate team, which meant frequently registering for debate tournaments. We learned early on that, once an event in any given tournament had reached capacity, no more students would be accepted into that track. And some of those events—for instance, the competition track for impromptu speaking—filled up in a matter of minutes.

With experiences like that—and a daughter keen to qualify for nationals—we learned how to handle registration so we'd be part of the action, come tournament time. We learned to be seated at the computer, logged into the appropriate site, with our hand hovering over the mouse, ready to click through, the minute the clock struck the right hour.

Fast forward—past our daughter's high school, college, and successful launch into adult life—to yesterday. The Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy was about to open registration for its 2019 season at 9:00 a.m., mountain time. That meant, for me, being at the ready before 8:00 a.m. Pacific time, on a Saturday morning. No sleeping in. No luxuriating over coffee and conversation with friends. Just boot up the computer, log in to the website and watch the countdown clock flip over to 0:00.

It's a good thing I did. I wasn't sure how popular my course selection was going to be, but I have done that wait list routine before. I just didn't want to chance it again—not to mention, who wants to wait until November or even late December to get the green light for a week-long trip?

As it turned out, watching social media just after securing my own registration, it was less than an hour afterwards when I saw the first announcement come up on Twitter. Not long after that, the SLIG social media team posted a note on the SLIG Facebook group with further updates: courses #3, #6, #11, #14, and #15 were already sold out.

I breathed a sigh of relief, of course, as course number six was my class, and I was already registered—probably at 8:01 a.m., my time. But I couldn't help ponder just how many people were actually put on the wait list for each of those classes. Of course, the actual counts for annual attendance are privileged information which I'm not entitled to know. But it does boggle my mind to consider how many people are willing to plunk down the $575 tuition (plus travel expenses, lodging and meals for a week) just to learn more about genealogical research.

Some people believe that genealogy is a waning fad, but when I see a response such as yesterday morning's registration frenzy, I'm encouraged to think there are a lot of us out there willing to delve more deeply into our craft as researchers. While being waitlisted for a class may be annoying, it is encouraging to see how many people are committed to a disciplined pursuit such as genealogy. (But I'm still glad to slip in under the wire and secure my seat for a class I've been looking forward to for years.)

Course 3 & 14. #SLIG2019 pic.twitter.com/wRCtbsgFYg

— Salt Lake Institute (@SLIGinstitute) July 7, 2018

Planning Ahead for Continuing Education

We're finally into the middle of summer, yet what is uppermost in my mind today is an event buried under the snow of winter. By the time you read this, I will have, hopefully, successfully completed my registration for next January's Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.

SLIG, as it's called by its more-handy moniker, is a week-long immersion in specific genealogical research topics, offered by the Utah Genealogical Association. This coming January, there will be fifteen courses offered by nationally-recognized instructors on a wide variety of topics—not to mention the additional offerings either extending the week's learning, or preceding it (with a twist), meeting learners virtually in the comfort of their own homes.

In the past, I've focused mainly on the courses offered in genetic genealogy, where I've been privileged to learn from luminaries such as Blaine Bettinger and CeCe Moore. Last year, I broke away from that realm to bolster my skills in a different arena: research in archives and through manuscript collections.

This year, once again, I hope to pick up skills in another area. I want to attend the course on Southern Research. This course, directed by J. Mark Lowe, hadn't been offered in the last couple years, but I know from past experience and word-of-mouth recommendation from friends who had attended the course previously that it is well worth taking.

Now that the opportunity has come up once again, I won't be waiting until the last minute to register. This calls for deploying a different strategy: sitting at my computer with my mouse pointed to click on the SLIG website link at the split second registration officially opens. If I can help it, I mean to get in well before the dreaded wait list icon pops up.

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.