Picture Mystery

 

The last two weeks have been all day misting rains which isn't very motivating to work and the next ten days looks to be more of the same. Instead of working in the garage, I've been keeping busy with my volunteer activities and doing some genealogy work. One of my long term goals has been to try to find pictures of all 32 of my great great great grandparents. It is an unachievable goals as some of them were too poor or died too young to have been able to have photographs taken of themselves, but I would like to get as many as possible.

A few of my pictures however come from a family book that I inherited that consists of pages run through a copy machine, three hole punched and bound in a cover. As one might expect with a picture of an ancestor that has been through a copy machine a number of times, they aren't very detailed. 

Above is one of those copied pictures. So in an attempt to try to get a better photograph, I did some sleuthing to find descendants of the authors of the inherited book hoping to find one who might know where the originals might be. I made contact with one such person who things she might have them but is currently on a long vacation and so I have to wait for a few weeks until she gets home and gets caught up on things to go looking for them.

Another one I contacted wrote back but didn't have any new pictures that I haven't already seen. But one picture she shared was labeled as being of my great great grandmother. I remembered that picture among the many pictures I inherited from my grandmother and so went back through all those pictures I scanned. I indeed found the same picture only it says it is of my grandmother and not my great great grandmother. But while searching for it on my hard drive, I found a folder of unknown photographs that I had scanned in from those I inherited from my grandmother. The most interesting one is the one at the top of this post. 

In it there is a young man in a horse drawn buggy with a family standing in the background beside the house. It looks to me as if the young man is there to pick up perhaps an older daughter for a date, the older daughter still inside getting ready or perhaps the one taking the picture. The picture is in remarkable shape and there are lots of details that I should analyze for awhile. I'm guessing I can solve the mystery of who these people in the picture are by identifying the house. I likely have other pictures of the same house among the hundreds I scanned in if I were just to compare.

Anyway, I wrote this post to show two things. First, as a genealogist, I have no shortage of mysteries to solve if I only had the time. Second, I have a hard time staying focused. I started off seeking a better picture of my 3rd great grandfather Alfred Buchholz seen above and find myself looking at unknown pictures given to me by his great granddaughter, my grandma. If I try hard, I can probably gain some focus but I'm not sure I'll ever gain enough time to solve all the mysteries.