Monday Is for Mothers: Maria De Guadalupe Lujan (1809 - 1884)

Following up on last week's post about a friend's fourth great grandmother, here's another, later portrait of Guadalupe with one of her daughters-in-law, Maria Pia de la Luz Herrera (1844-1914).*

[Luz Herrera de Quintana [right] and Maria de Guadalupe Lujan de Quintana]

A note on the photographer: Richard “R.J.” Arnold was born in England in 1856 and died in Monterey, California, in 1929. Over the years he had photo studios in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Alameda before moving to Monterey in 1901. In 2015 some of his photographs were in several exhibitions which you can read about here and here.**



*Luz was the wife of my friend's fourth great uncle Pedro de Jesus Maria Quintana (1833-1921).
**The painted background in this double portrait can be seen in several of the photographs in the exhibitions.



© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Family Friday: Who Is this Kid?

Although my notes say this is a portrait of my great grandfather Lewis Logan Slater (1855-1905) as a baby, I don't think it is. For one thing, Lewis Logan had light eyes and this little guy clearly doesn't. Also the photographer was in Wichita, Kansas, and the Slaters didn't leave Illinois until Lewis Logan was 28. And this photograph doesn't look like it dates from the mid-1850s.

[Courtesy of Olive Slater-Kennedy]

A search for a photographer in Wichita named Rawlins in Langdon's List of 19th & Early 20th Century Photographers brings up only two names, both at the same address in an 1890 city directory.

[Photographers: R. Langdon road.com]

Under the heading of Photograph Galleries in an 1889 Wichita city directory there's a listing for W. J. Rawlins.

[Directory of the City of Wichita, 1889. Source: Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.]

And there's only one Rawlins listed in the general pages of the same city directory.

[Directory of the City of Wichita, 1889. Source: Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.]

So I believe I've disposed of the idea that this photograph can possibly be a picture of my great grandfather and was likely taken around 1890. But I'm no nearer figuring out who he is.


© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Fantastic Find: Fixed in Time: A New and Helpful Guide to Dating Daguerreotypes

[Angry Child; Albert Bisbee, Child on a Rocking Horse, about 1855, daguerreotype, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment]

You might be lucky enough to have a ancestral daguerreotype tucked away in a drawer and you've been wondering when it was taken. There is help!

Sean William Nolan has come to your rescue via a post on the blog of the Photographic Historical Society of New England (PHSNE).

"His hard work and his scholarship are impressive. In Fixed in Time, available for all through a free download, he methodically lays out the process for making a best guess as to the age of cased daguerreotypes. He has spent years on this and it shows."

There is a Facebook page for Mr. Nolan's book and if you share you contact information with him, he has promised to keep you up to date on his research.

If you don't happen to have a daguerreotype but would like to look at some, there are online collections of them available from the Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the George Eastman House.

© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.