Interpreting Our Ancestors' Early Photographs--1. The Scandinavians

I first posted this in January of 2015, discussing some vintage photographs of my Swedish and Norwegian ancestors--my father's side. I ended by saying that I would write another essay-- one dealing with my mother's Swiss-French side of the family, which settled in Tennessee long before the Civil War.  Never did get around to writing that post, but I'd better do it soon, because I'm hoping to put all my posts about antique photos and how to understand them into a book that will be called "Sepia Secrets/ The Story Behind the Photograph".

I’m a passionate collector of antique photographs—especially daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography, which were introduced to the world by Louis Daguerre in France in August of 1839. 

In this day of “selfies” and smart-phone videos that share images of just about everything via the internet as soon as it happens, it’s hard to imagine the sensation caused by the first photographs—scientifically accurate portraits “written by the sun”.  A daguerreotype is an image produced on a silver-coated copper plate, which uses iodine and mercury to develop it.  For early daguerreotypes, you had to sit very still for many minutes, not smile or blink (your head often in a brace) and the fumes produced in the developing often made the photographer ill.  Even the touch of a feather on the sensitized silver plate would scar the image, so daguerreotypes had to be protected under glass and housed in a case that opens and closes like a book.

My favorite thing to do is to research the story behind an antique image—who (or what) is the subject?  When was the image taken?  What is the photographer trying to tell us?   While daguerreotype photography spread quickly around the world, (and nowhere was it more popular than in the United States), most people in the 1840’s and 1850’s, except for the famous or wealthy, would have only one image taken of themselves in their lifetime.  Often this would be a photo of a serious couple, seated side by side, soon after their wedding.  The photo was a sort of solemn, official record that they were married.  And if a child died, as so often happened, or an old grandfather who had fought in the Revolutionary War passed away, the daguerreotype photographer was quickly called to “save the shadow ere the substance fade”, as the photographers’ ads often put it. 

But the photographer could only do his job on a sunny day.  Usually the studio would be on a top floor of a walk-up under a skylight to capture the best light—because there were no electric lights.

While I have often researched and written essays about antique and historic photographs—(see the list of titles at right)—I have rarely written about my own family’s vintage photos, although I have them hanging on several walls of my house and look at them every day. I’m going to tell the stories behind some of my  antique photographs, so that you can get clues as to what to look for in your family photos from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.  And I’m going to do it in two parts—first the stories of my father’s family; all of them Swedes and Norwegians, and then my mother’s family who were Swiss-French on the maternal side and Scotch-Irish on the other.

Here is a photograph of the family and house and possessions of Jorgen J. Odegaard, the man with the furry hat and bushy beard on the right.  He was born in 1856 in Norway and immigrated to the United States where he married another Norwegian immigrant, Oline Kaurstad in 1870. They first settled in Iowa, but with no money and no work, they headed for Minnesota (as did many Scandinavians) in search of free land in Santiago Township.  They settled near a swamp.

My father told me that Jorgen had the first pair of matched horses in the county.  You can see them tied up on the left.  In photographs of this era (1880’s) an itinerant photographer would come by, with his camera mounted on a tripod, knock on your door, and if you wanted a photograph, the family would be arranged in front of the house, with the most valued possessions in view.  This photo with the rare pair of horses is like a photo of a man leaning on his brand new sports car.  From the same period is a photo I have of the farmhouse I now live in.  The whole family and farm hands are standing in front of the barn and house with the prize bull tethered front and center and the ladies in their frilly hats and long dresses standing in front of the horse-drawn buggy.

The little girl in the white pinafore or apron above was Jorgen’s oldest child and my grandmother—Ida Odegard (the second “a” in Odegaard fell out somewhere). The baby in his mother’s arms is John who, I discovered on Google, “married in 1905 and then operated the first Ford agency in the area in 1912.  He offered free driving lessons with every sale, as no one knew how to operate motor vehicles.  He often accepted livestock, buggies and other items in lieu of cash.”

This photo of Jorgen’s family is not an original— it’s a simple photocopy which has no value as a photograph, but to me it’s priceless.

Compare it to this photo of the same family around 20 years later. This photo is an original and printed at the bottom is “Residence of J. O. Odegard, Santiago, Sherburne Co. Minnesota, June 7 1902”.  The little girl in the white pinafore in the previous photo is now the married lady sitting in a chair in a white dress, her hand touching her first of four sons—my uncle John Paulson.  She had married my grandfather, Par Paulson, who is seated at the far right. Her parents, Jorgen and Oline, who’s 45 in this photo, had nine children in all and the little girl toddler between her parents is a sibling to her married sister Ida. So the toddler on the left is the aunt to the toddler on the right—and she is the same age as her nephew. I’ve been told that the house in this photo is the same as the small shack in the first photo, but it has now been expanded to house the growing family (nine children!), adding a second floor and two chimneys and lots of space.

The wonderful names of Jorgen’s children are:  Ida, John, Mathilda, Edwin, Julius, Oscar, Olga, Alma, and Odin.

At the top of this post is a wedding photograph of my grandmother Ida Odegard, marrying my grandfather, Par Paulson, around 1899.  I have always thought that large floral bush on her head looked fairly ridiculous but I showed it to a friend from Norway and she told me that it is a traditional “Blomster Krans”.

The wedding photograph is a cabinet card –a photograph mounted on heavy cardboard-- which has been embossed in ornate silver script  “E. S. Hill, St. Cloud, Minn”. Cabinet cards, 4 inches by 5 ½ inches, were very popular from 1870 to about 1900. Photos of actors, politicians, freaks and famous people in this format were sold and collected in albums.

I knew my grandmother Ida well—she let me gather the eggs from her hen house and, after she beheaded a chicken every Sunday for dinner, we would de-feather it together.  I didn’t know until I was older that Ida was a very strong-minded and independent woman who shocked her family by marrying Par Paulson, a Swede instead of a Norwegian!, and then divorcing him after they had four sons. She moved with her college-age sons to Minneapolis where she opened a boarding house and became known for her apple pie. Then she married another Swede, John Erickson, who, like her first husband, was a mail carrier.  I adored John Erickson, my step-grandfather,  who taught me to shoot his rifle across the Mississippi River.  I only met my real grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was totally deaf.  To "talk" to him you had to write on a blackboard with chalk.

Here is my grandmother Ida holding a blonde cherub with sausage curls, a white dress and a bow in its hair.  That child is my father, Robert Odegard Paulson, born April 3, 1905.  It may seem shocking that he’s been dressed and groomed like a little girl, but back in the day, little boys and girls were dressed alike until about five or six years old. If you want some clues as to how to tell the boys and girls apart in vintage photographs check out the post I did called "Tots with Antique Toys--Boy or Girl?"

This photograph is printed on a nine-inch round tin plate embellished with beautiful flowers.  I’ve seen other, similar photos on tin, dating around the turn of the century, but I don’t know what they’re called.  (They’re not proper tintypes or ferrotypes—that’s another thing entirely.)  In tiny letters under the left corner of the photo is written “copyrighted 1908 by Crover MFG.”  My father would have been three years old in 1908.

In my next blog post I’ll share the stories and photos of my mother’s French-speaking ancestors, some pre-dating the civil war.

Interpreting Our Ancestors’ Early Photos—I. The Scandinavians

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I’m a passionate collector of antique photographs—especially daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography, which were introduced to the world by Louis Daguerre in France in August of 1839. 

In this day of “selfies” and smart-phone videos that share images of just about everything via the internet as soon as it happens, it’s hard to imagine the sensation caused by the first photographs—scientifically accurate portraits “written by the sun”.  A daguerreotype is an image produced on a silver-coated copper plate, which uses iodine and mercury to develop it.  For early daguerreotypes, you had to sit very still for many minutes, not smile or blink (your head often in a brace) and the fumes produced in the developing often made the photographer ill.  Even the touch of a feather on the sensitized silver plate would scar the image, so daguerreotypes had to be protected under glass and housed in a case that opens and closes like a book.

My favorite thing to do is to research the story behind an antique image—who (or what) is the subject?  When was the image taken?  What is the photographer trying to tell us?   While daguerreotype photography spread quickly around the world, (and nowhere was it more popular than in the United States), most people in the 1840’s and 1850’s, except for the famous or wealthy, would have only one image taken of themselves in their lifetime.  Often this would be a photo of a serious couple, seated side by side, soon after their wedding.  The photo was a sort of solemn, official record that they were married.  And if a child died, as so often happened, or an old grandfather who had fought in the Revolutionary War passed away, the daguerreotype photographer was quickly called to “save the shadow ere the substance fade”, as the photographers’ ads often put it. 

But the photographer could only do his job on a sunny day.  Usually the studio would be on a top floor of a walk-up under a skylight to capture the best light—because there were no electric lights.

While I have often researched and written essays about antique and historic photographs—(see the list of titles at right)—I have rarely written about my own family’s vintage photos, although I have them hanging on several walls of my house and look at them every day. I’m going to tell the stories behind some of my  antique photographs, so that you can get clues as to what to look for in your family photos from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.  And I’m going to do it in two parts—first the stories of my father’s family; all of them Swedes and Norwegians, and then my mother’s family who were Swiss-French on the maternal side and Scotch-Irish on the other.

Here is a photograph of the family and house and possessions of Jorgen J. Odegaard, the man with the furry hat and bushy beard on the right.  He was born in 1856 in Norway and immigrated to the United States where he married another Norwegian immigrant, Oline Kaurstad in 1870. They first settled in Iowa, but with no money and no work, they headed for Minnesota (as did many Scandinavians) in search of free land in Santiago Township.  They settled near a swamp.

My father told me that Jorgen had the first pair of matched horses in the county.  You can see them tied up on the left.  In photographs of this era (1880’s) an itinerant photographer would come by, with his camera mounted on a tripod, knock on your door, and if you wanted a photograph, the family would be arranged in front of the house, with the most valued possessions in view.  This photo with the rare pair of horses is like a photo of a man leaning on his brand new sports car.  From the same period is a photo I have of the farmhouse I now live in.  The whole family and farm hands are standing in front of the barn and house with the prize bull tethered front and center and the ladies in their frilly hats and long dresses standing in front of the horse-drawn buggy.

The little girl in the white pinafore or apron above was Jorgen’s oldest child and my grandmother—Ida Odegard (the second “a” in Odegaard fell out somewhere). The baby in his mother’s arms is John who, I discovered on Google, “married in 1905 and then operated the first Ford agency in the area in 1912.  He offered free driving lessons with every sale, as no one knew how to operate motor vehicles.  He often accepted livestock, buggies and other items in lieu of cash.”

This photo of Jorgen’s family is not an original— it’s a simple photocopy which has no value as a photograph, but to me it’s priceless.

Compare it to this photo of the same family around 20 years later. This photo is an original and printed at the bottom is “Residence of J. O. Odegard, Santiago, Sherburne Co. Minnesota, June 7 1902”.  The little girl in the white pinafore in the previous photo is now the married lady sitting in a chair in a white dress, her hand touching her first of four sons—my uncle John Paulson.  She had married my grandfather, Par Paulson, who is seated at the far right. Her parents, Jorgen and Oline, who’s 45 in this photo, had nine children in all and the little girl toddler between her parents is a sibling to her married sister Ida. So the toddler on the left is the aunt to the toddler on the right—and she is the same age as her nephew. I’ve been told that the house in this photo is the same as the small shack in the first photo, but it has now been expanded to house the growing family (nine children!), adding a second floor and two chimneys and lots of space.

The wonderful names of Jorgen’s children are:  Ida, John, Mathilda, Edwin, Julius, Oscar, Olga, Alma, and Odin.

At the top of this post is a wedding photograph of my grandmother Ida Odegard, marrying my grandfather, Par Paulson, around 1899.  I have always thought that large floral bush on her head looked fairly ridiculous but I showed it to a friend from Norway and she told me that it is a traditional “Blomster Krans”.

The wedding photograph is a cabinet card –a photograph mounted on heavy cardboard-- which has been embossed in ornate silver script  “E. S. Hill, St. Cloud, Minn”. Cabinet cards, 4 inches by 5 ½ inches, were very popular from 1870 to about 1900. Photos of actors, politicians, freaks and famous people in this format were sold and collected in albums.

I knew my grandmother Ida well—she let me gather the eggs from her hen house and, after she beheaded a chicken every Sunday for dinner, we would de-feather it together.  I didn’t know until I was older that Ida was a very strong-minded and independent woman who shocked her family by marrying Par Paulson, a Swede instead of a Norwegian!, and then divorcing him after they had four sons. She moved with her college-age sons to Minneapolis where she opened a boarding house and became known for her apple pie. Then she married another Swede, John Erickson, who, like her first husband, was a mail carrier.  I adored John Erickson, my step-grandfather,  who taught me to shoot his rifle across the Mississippi River.  I only met my real grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was totally deaf.  To "talk" to him you had to write on a blackboard with chalk.

Here is my grandmother Ida holding a blonde cherub with sausage curls, a white dress and a bow in its hair.  That child is my father, Robert Odegard Paulson, born April 3, 1905.  It may seem shocking that he’s been dressed and groomed like a little girl, but back in the day, little boys and girls were dressed alike until about five or six years old. If you want some clues as to how to tell the boys and girls apart in vintage photographs check out the post I did called "Tots with Antique Toys--Boy or Girl?"

This photograph is printed on a nine-inch round tin plate embellished with beautiful flowers.  I’ve seen other, similar photos on tin, dating around the turn of the century, but I don’t know what they’re called.  (They’re not proper tintypes or ferrotypes—that’s another thing entirely.)  In tiny letters under the left corner of the photo is written “copyrighted 1908 by Crover MFG.”  My father would have been three years old in 1908.

In my next blog post I’ll share the stories and photos of my mother’s French-speaking ancestors, some pre-dating the civil war.

An Ecstatic Historian and An Inspiring Teacher Who Deserve to Be Remembered

I never met Edmund Schofield face to face, and I only met him over the telephone six days before he died unexpectedly on April 17, 2010.  He was calling, he said, because he wanted to talk to my husband, author Nicholas Gage, but when I replied Nick was out of the country, he started asking me questions.

Ed Schofield was a passionate scholar, researcher and historian.  He spent his life unearthing secrets of the history of his hometown, Worcester, MA, and he did it out of his love of knowledge—no one was paying him.  His goal, as he told me, was to complete the book he was writing about Worcester’s history.

I recognized a kindred soul in the voice on the phone.  Ed was as excited about unearthing a nugget of information as I was when I learned the sitter’s identity or the story hidden in an antique photograph (such as the ones in the list at right.)

When Ed called me, he was on the track of a deceased high school English teacher named  Anna Shaughnessy, (1896-1985), an Irish spinster who taught for 45 years in Worcester’s Classical High School.  Ed was set on rescuing her from obscurity after he discovered that Miss Shaughnessy had taught and inspired several of Worcester’s most celebrated authors and poets, including Stanley J. Kunitz (one-time Poet Laureate),   poet Charles J. Olson and Milton Meltzer, author of more than 100 books on such subjects as Jewish, African-American and American history, primarily for young people.

The reason he was calling, Ed said, was to ask if by any chance my husband, Nicholas Gage, an author who had attended Classical High School, had been a student of Miss Shaughnessy as well.

I didn’t know the answer, I told him, but I’d ask the next time Nick called from Greece. 

Our conversation continued, because I learned that Ed was an expert on the subject of historical photographs, especially the daguerreotypes taken of Henry David Thoreau in 1856 by the Benjamin Maxham studio in Worcester.  In fact, Ed used to be president of the Thoreau Society.  The three Thoreau daguerreotypes are now in museums, he told me, but one of two ambrotypes made of him in New Bedford in 1861 has gone missing, firing the dreams of photo collectors like myself.

As soon as we hung up the phone, Ed e-mailed me a half dozen of his articles on Worcester abolitionists, John Brown and Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau and “Miss Anna Camilla Shaughnessy, Poets’ Muse.”

The next day, after my husband called from Greece, I sent a quick email to Ed, with the following message: 

“Hi Ed, I talked to Nick this morning and he said that, yes, he had Miss Shaughnessy for 10^th grade and she made him editor of the paper and he was one of her favorite pupils and he thinks he was in her class in 11^th grade too.

So you have another Worcester writer mentored by her…”

Seven minutes later he replied: 

Dear  Joan,

Wonderful, wonderful wonderful!

Yes, yes, Nicholas will be in my article—a coup.  What a school that must have been…

More later, after I ponder and am able to absorb your message.

I’m ecstatic!  I’m sure you know how writers can become ecstatic—not to mention collectors like you.

O happy day.

Ed

 Ten minutes after that, having pondered, he sent me another e-mail:

Joan,

S. N. Behrman, Stanley Kunitz, Charles Olson, Milton Meltzer, Donald Baker, Nicholas Gage---omigosh, what a "haul." Those in color I know had Miss Shaughnessy. Behrman was too early for her; Baker I'm still working on!

I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nicholas in the lineup. His “A Place for Us” will now be in the list of autobiographical works having to do with growing up in Worcester, along with Behrman's “The Worcester Account”  and Meltzer's “Starting from Home”. I wonder if there are more.

Really, I feel there was a kind of magic in Worcester in those days, and I'm thrilled to be in contact with one of Miss Shaughnessy's former students.

Ed.

I could see that Ed was falling in love with the Irish spinster who devoted her life to teaching and mentoring high school students who would become notable authors and poets.  I understood perfectly.  It’s how artists fall in love with their models, biographers fall in love with their subjects, and antique photo collectors fall in love with long-dead people, especially those they’ve identified and researched.  It’s an intimidating feeling to hold in your hand the image of someone who sat in front of a camera 170 years ago and to realize that you are the only living being on the face of the earth who knows the identity and significance of that person.

That’s sort of how I feel about Edmund Schofield.  Five days after he wrote “I’m ecstatic!  O happy day”,  Ed died as he was sitting on a bench in Worcester’s restored Union Station, waiting for a train to take him into Boston—no doubt to do more research. 

His obituary said that Ed’s only close family member was a sister. I was pleased to learn that his papers and research were going to  “The Walden Woods Project” Library at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, MA.  On its web site is written: “The Edmund A. Schofield Collection consists of materials collected and created by Edmund A. Schofield Jr. – botanist, ecologist, educator, editor, writer and conservationist; former director and president of the Thoreau Society; a founding director and president of the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance; and president of Walden Forever Wild.”

So all his research and his unfinished masterwork about Worcester history are in a library where they can be accessed.  But he left me with six of his articles on my computer, including the one about Miss Shaughnessy, to which he was never able to add his latest discovery—that she mentored author Nicholas Gage as well.

Having Ed haunting my computer for three years has troubled me, because I know that his eloquent article on Miss Shaughnessy deserves to be read.  She was an extraordinary woman (and a Worcester treasure) who deserves to be celebrated, not lost to history.  So in my next post, on Friday, I will publish “Anna Camilla Shaughnessy, Poets’ Muse” by Edmund A. Schofield.

VINTAGE FASHION VICTIMS – a Preview

I know I haven’t finished the story of the Hindu wedding – the extravaganza we attended in India that rivaled a Bollywood production. I will! With lots of beautiful photos! But lately I’ve been preoccupied with finishing a project I’m working on called “Vintage Fashion Victims”.

It’s not a book, it’s 30 jumbo postcards (5 by 7 inches) with the subtitle “A humorous look at fashion foibles of yesterday and insights into photography’s roots.”

For over a decade, I’ve been collecting antique photographs from the very earliest (daguerreotypes, beginning in 1839) through ambrotypes, tintypes, CDVs and Cabinet Cards, and I wanted to design a series of postcards showing some of the funniest and/or most beautiful fashion images in my collection. On the front of each card is a caption, making fun of the outfit, although I dearly love each and every one of these women! And as I point out in the text included with the postcards, if these vintage bathing beauties in their bloomers and brides dwarfed by giant corsages could see a photograph of me in a 1960’s mini-skirt, they would fall about laughing. We’re not laughing at each other, but with each other. Really!

On the back of each postcard are a few words about the woman on the front and the kind of photograph it is. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing a few images from the days when a woman’s visit to the photographer’s studio required a lot of thinking about what to wear. I’ll post a few more tomorrow. (If you click on the postcards the images get bigger.)

Card 1. The caption on the front is; “I like to dress on the cutting edge” and the information on the back says “This cabinet card was created by M. Borsuk in his studio at 124 Norfolk St. in New York City. Both the bespectacled young lady with the extraordinary hat and two fur ruffs and the photographer, who designed the studio setting, seem to agree that more is more.”

Card 5. The caption on the front is: “Proud to be a full-figured woman!” and the explanation on the back: “She’s an actress with more oomph than Mae West! On the back of this cabinet card (circa 1905) in handwriting: ‘Virginia Drew Trescott, leading woman in ‘Fast Life in New York’, American Theatre, Feb. 6…the lady is an old and valued friend of mine—she is too good an actress for melodrama – and is only in those to get a New York hearing. Hope you can make a picture and come to see her work. Yours, Lawrence H. Eddy.’

Card 30. The caption on the front is: “Unlike men, women are born with the ability to accessorize.” On the back: “A cabinet card by Brigham of Dover, N.H. shows that the young ladies of Wolfboro, photographed on Aug. 8, 1883, have a far better sense of style and ability to accessorize than the young men in their group.”