Photographs Across The Generations -- How Far Can You Go? (October 16, 2014)

L to R:  Molly, Eulalie, Doreen and Jonathan (May 19, 1984)

Each week The Weekly Genealogist, newsletter of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), asks a survey question of its readers. This week the question is . . .

"What is the largest number of generations of your family pictured in a single photograph?"

The question led me to the photograph above, which shows four generations from our family in a single photograph. The snapshot was taken on May 19, 1984 -- just one week to the day after the birth of our first child, Jonathan. Pictured are Jonathan's great grandmother, Eulalie Jeffs; his grandmother, Doreen (Jeffs) O'Kane; and his mother, Molly (O'Kane) Tew. This photograph is the most recent of three such four-generation photographs I have been able to locate in our family photograph collection; the others involve earlier generations than depicted here.

On a related matter, this survey question led me to ponder another question, "What is the greatest number of generations back that I can go and still have a photographic depiction of an ancestor?" 

After a little research (and the very recent discovery of the photograph of an ancestor), I have determined that in eight instances our family can presently go back seven generations to photographs of: my sons' 4x great grandparents, Russell Cooke (b. 1810) and his wife Mary Vinal [Otis] Cooke (b. 1806); my sons' 4x great grandmother, Nancy Mason [Bullock] Carpenter (b. 1793); my sons'  4x great grandmother, Abby [Hunt] Miller (b. 1807); my sons' 4x great grandfather, William Wood (b. circa 1820); my sons' 4x great grandfather, Nathan Walker (b. 1808); and my sons' 4x great grandparents, John Bowen Shearman (b. 1799) and his wife Ann Eliza [Patt] Shearman (b. 1803). *

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Scan of the original snapshot in the family collection. 

*  And with the birth of our first grandchild within the next three weeks or so, the photographs of the named ancestors above will soon be extended back eight generations!

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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew

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Three Family Daguerreotypes (November 19, 2013)

Ann Eliza Patt (1803 - 1887), wife of John Bowen Shearman

John Bowen Shearman (1799 - 1881), husband of Ann Eliza Patt

Samuel Carpenter (1828 - 1904)

Yesterday was the birthday of Louis-Jacques-Mande' Daguerre (November 18, 1787 - July 10, 1851). Daguerre was an artist and a physicist.  He is best known for his invention of an early method of photography that took his name as the daguerreotype.  

The process Daguerre developed took advantage of the light sensitivity of silver salts. It involved exposing copper sheets having a layer of silver plating on it to vapors given off by iodine crystals.  This procedure left a very thin layer of light-sensitive silver iodide that could then be exposed in a camera.  The big problem with this late 1830s photographic process was that it required long exposures to produce a decent image and so early subjects were buildings and things that could not move.  Human subjects had to stay as still as possible for a long time for portraits and that is one reason the poses look so wooden and frozen.  

Millions of daguerreotypes were produced when the process was refined and portrait sitting times were reduced from as much as thirty minutes to just a few seconds, but when paper-based processes replaced the metal daguerreotypes beginning in around 1855, the expense and difficult viewing of the daguerreotype photograph spelled its demise; by the late 1860s few photographers were still using the daguerreotype process.

The above daguerreotypes are of my 3rd great grandparents, John and Ann Shearman, and my 2nd great grandfather, Samuel Carpenter, in his Civil War uniform.

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Daguerreotypes in the personal collection of the author.

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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