In Plain Sight

It is Memorial Day, 2018, and I am "free" (in the sense of being finished with another school year) and also "free" (in the sense of having certain unalienable rights and privileges). That second kind of "free" is mostly dependent upon my own willingness to do battle to guard those rights--and some battles must be fought with words, both written and spoken. On this day when we're exhorted to remember the men and women who died in the service of the United States, my opinion is that those sacrifices have been in vain if we carelessly allow our own rights to be abridged by permitting those who would trample on them to flourish. 

And with that, my 5 minutes on the soapbox are done.

Recently I asked a friend of mine to help me locate a certain photo I'd misplaced...I, the OCD save-and-filer whose notebooks are even indexed! It's because over a number of years I've worked on three computers and lived in several different places, all of which requires re-storing things. When I begged Richard for help, he--being even more OCD than I, if possible--looked through old emails going back years. He couldn't find the photo. 

I was aggravated; but, in the big scheme of things (I soothed myself), it didn't matter so much. Eventually I'd find it, because I don't dispose of historic documents. You can imagine my eye-rolling, then (directed at myself, of course), when the photo turned up on THIS computer in MY documents. In plain sight.

I'm not sure just where I obtained this copy of the picture--possibly from a Tolbert relative who came to one of the long-ago reunions held in Meridian, MS. At any rate, I seem to recall that nobody knew for certain who the people in the photo were. Some years after I got it, I began comparing with other pictures and tried to make some educated guesses.

Who are they? See bottom.

When we learn adjectives in Spanish (tall, ugly, artistic, etc.), I have fun with my students at school: I scrounge up from the Internet photos of assorted famous folk--rappers, singers, actors, politicians--when they were children. The students have to ID them and then describe what they're like, in sentences. It's always entertaining to hear them say, "Nah, that CAN'T be Will Smith back when!" 

It's like being startled when you see a photo of yourself--one you're unfamiliar with, one a friend took that you didn't know she was snapping--and for a second or two don't recognize yourself. Wow...who IS that old hag? It CAN'T be...ME?

So here's the picture in question. I invite you to ID it, if you can, before you consider my own guesses.

Now, take a glance at these two old photos, which I know to be of Henry R. Tolbert and Mary Amanda Ann Mott Tolbert.

Henry R. Tolbert

Mary Amanda Ann Mott Tolbert

I'm not certain when they were taken. However, given that Henry R. Tolbert was born in 1843, and his hair and beard are thin here, my guess is that the portraits would've been done maybe after about 1880, 1885, when he was over 40. 

Then compare both of the older people in the first photo to these two. 

 

I can't prove the connection, though maybe someone "out there" has the original picture of the younger couple and can ID it. But, looking at the similarities in hairlines, ear positions, shapes of noses and so on, I believe the parents in the family grouping are the same as the individual portraits I know to be of Henry and Amanda. Would anyone like to comment? 

Who is the baby on the man's lap? And--if this is indeed a portrait of Henry and Amanda-- which of their 12 children is the girl standing behind them? She seems to be 10-13 years old, maybe a little older. It's possible she's Mary F., who shows up on the 1870 census at age 2 (so she would've been about 12 in 1880); but since she wasn't living at home in 1880, yet other, older siblings WERE, that raises the question of why more of the children aren't in the photo. I have no answers to these questions; I hope one of you does.

Before I completely end this post today, I'm going to include a story I've been puzzling over for some years, not spreading around before now because I just could not verify it. An older gentleman named Hanson Harbour and I emailed back and forth a few times in 2002. Mr. Harbour had gotten in touch with me, relating an intriguing tale and wondering if my Tolbert ancestor was related to the men of his story. I'll let you read it for yourselves:

The graves are there, and the men died on the same day, so the story could be true.

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2314001/tolbert-cemetery

My own ancestor doesn't seem to be VERY closely related to David Charles Tolbert, if at all, but I'd like to hear from anyone who knows more about this. And, by the way, many years ago I found the census information for the David Charles Tolbert shown above and his wife Eliza in Kemper County; at the time, I copied it down, thinking perhaps one day it would fit into the tree somewhere. It's interesting to me that if the people shown as being his parents (John M. Talbert and Mary Rachel Talbert, at the top of the chart over the findagrave link) actually WERE, then they were rather old when he was born! 

[I am also fairly sure that John Charles Tolbert was 25, not 15, when he died. You notice that he has a "new" marker; when Mr. Harbour visited the cemetery in 2002, as you see above, he found, in addition to the "new" marker, a rock there also. It's likely the rock had had something scratched into at one time, as did the one at Dave Tolbert's grave, but time and the elements had eroded whatever might have been there originally.]

Ælfwine

 
Answers to above pictures: Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo DiCaprio.