Skip to main content

Photo Repatriation - Part I



Dear ______,

My name is Sarah Melvey, and I am writing in regard to the Howell branch of your family. I currently live in Williamsburg, Virginia...and while browsing through one of our many local antique shops, I came across a beautiful baby portrait taken in the late 1890s with the name "Josephine Fulton Howell" written on the back. Out of curiosity, I decided to put my genealogical skills to work to try to identify as much as possible about Miss Josephine - mainly in an effort to identify current living relatives (potentially with family trees in Ancestry). My goal is to repatriate or re-home the photo and make sure it returns to the family...


Genealogical serendipity.  I have been on the receiving end of so many research hand-outs that I only thought it worthwhile to attempt to pay it forward in my own little way.  Enter Josephine Fulton Howell - the beautifully staged baby in the portrait above.  Note the detailed background - the flowers on the sideboard, the tufted velvet settee.  She gazes lovingly and curiously to the side (maybe mother is making silly faces?).  What's not to love?

I was heartbroken to discover that Josephine died in 1907 in Philadelphia - of a cause I cannot yet determine (without purchasing and ordering her death record).  The indexed version gives no clue as to cause of death, though I do know that Philadelphia suffered a large Typhoid fever outbreak in the early 1900s.  Her parents, Charles and Mary Howell, had two remaining daughters - Louise and May.  It is my greatest hope that I can locate a next-of-kin willing and appreciative enough to accept this original photo or a digital copy, for that matter.  Time will tell!  I sent the note above to a likely candidate via Ancestry.com.  Fingers crossed - and I promise an update as soon as possible...

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pay It Forward

A bit of joy for my Friday! Our mail delivery within our little military community here in Sicily is so.very.sloooooow.  What makes it maddening is that it can be a combination of super-fast and super-slow...so no one seems to balk at the trend of inconsistency.  Maybe I complain enough for everyone :). I'm in the middle of a few genealogical mysteries - one of them being the family origins of a Mr. Joseph W. Daly, a paternal great-grandfather of my husband.  Like most of the challenging parts of our tree, I hit a wall with Joseph a few months back and promptly put him aside when something a little more lucrative came along.  For sake of ease.  Now, we meet again.  For this one, I even consulted a few curious friends.  I felt like maybe I wasn't searching deep enough or with the right "keywords" online or in my genealogy search engines.  Some researchers have favored methodologies for searching, and I felt I needed to branch out.  One ...
11 comments
Read more

Lingering Questions...

 There is a huge, genealogical elephant in my living room.   Every so often, he nudges me with his trunk, he asks for fresh water, and bats his long eyelashes at me in hopes that I will scratch behind his giant elephant ears. My theory about family history research is that nothing is as cut and dry as it seems at first.   Dig a little deeper – search a few newspaper archives – and you’ll either make your particular research question a) more complicated, or b) exceptionally clear in a way you never expected. By the time I actually his “POST” on this article, I will most likely have re-written it several times.   This elephant is giant.   HUGE.   Effecting the way an entire branch of my family will view its identity – even its surnames.   I’m putting on kid gloves.   But most importantly – I want to outline for my extended family and my future family exactly how I arrived at my present hypothesis.   I feel deeply convicted that ...
2 comments
Read more

Chicken or Duck?

I'm feeling a little scattered these days.  Could be the breezy Fall weather - a wonderful sight after three long years in Sicily's arid climate.  Instead of olive and blood orange trees, I'm gazing out of my kitchen window appreciating our collection of hardwoods.  Leaves are everywhere, and the piles are only going to get bigger.  I am treasuring every last one. My research brain is also a bit scattered.  A little genetic genealogy over here...a little "other people's genealogy" over there.  Most of this is flat-out procrastination from dealing with the pile of photos I need to archive and the folder of newly-located probate records to transcribe.  There's also that little thing of needing to manage my household.  Oh, and clean.  And feed children :). In the meantime, I stumbled upon a snippet from the Reading Times (A Web Footed Chicken (1890, August 4).  The Reading Times , p. 1.  Retrieved from www.newspapers.com)). Sar...
3 comments
Read more