Write on your photographs!!

I am always encouraging people to write on the back of your photographs!! You may know who is in them, but not everyone else will years down the road.

I am fairly good figuring things like this out, but not always.

Take these two photos for example. These are beautiful photos and I have no idea who these people are. (They both were with photos from my Dad's side of the family.)




This beautiful photo is of the Parks family.



There is actually writing on the back, but as you can see, it doesn' t help all that much.



There are six names on the back of the photo, and seven people in the photo. And, one of the names is fairly indecipherable. And "Grandma" is not helpful either without a name attached to it. Is that the grandmother of the people in the photo, or the person writing the names on the back of the photo?

I was able to figure out, with reasonable certainty, who all these people were, based, actually, on other photos.

Ambrose Parks and Mary Andemia Gower had eight children, six of which grew to adulthood. These children were George Ambrose. Nancy Almira, Laura Etta, Minnie Alice, Nellie Isabella and James WIlson.

It was easy to figure out the men, as their ages are seventeen years apart. So, this is George:



and this is James:


If there was any doubt, here is a (really bad!) photo of James as an adult:



So, now the women. It turns out that the names on the back are not written in any particular order, so it was not as easy as matching the name with the position they were standing in. As it so happened, the positions they are standing in is actually the clue that helped me figure out which woman was which.

Let's take Minnie for example. This is her in the first photo:



and here she is in a (really bad!) photo from circa 1944. She is in virtually the same position!



The same thing with Nancy Almira. (I believe that the indecipherable name on the back of the photo is hers, but I still can't figure out how.) Here she is in the first photo:



And here she is, circa 1944:



Nellie is not listed on the reverse of the photo, so I didn't want to leave her out. I don't have a photo of her from later on.



Lastly, my great-grandmother, Laura Etta. This is her in the first photo:



and this is a photo of her in 1947:



And, Grandma. . . .



Well, she is either Grandma Parks or Grandma Gower, neither of which I have any information, or she is the grandmother of the person who wrote the names, and she is the mother of the children in the photographs, which would make her Mary Andemia Gower Parks. I am guessing that this is the case.

Mary's husband Ambrose died in April of 1911. The woman in the photo is dressed in black, which I am making the assumption, is mourning clothes. There are still a lot of leaves on the trees, so this would put the photo in the early 1911, or into the spring/summer of 1912. Laura married Porter Marshall about 1912, so this was right around the time she got married.

So, make sure you write on the back of your photographs. Names, dates, places. Your great-grandchildren will thank you for it! : )

Direct line ancestry: Mary Andemina Gower --> Laura Etta Parks --> Richard Allen Marshall --> Donald William (Caman) Marshall --> Lora Marshall Nehring