Old Photos and Secrets

How easy it is to do things today. How much we take for granted.

I was at Vicki’s the other day, scanning a set of very old photographs for posterity’s sake (and yours!). It was an easy matter to unplug my HP scanner, pick up my laptop computer, and then reconnect them at her house and get to work.

Modern scanners entered the market in the 1980's, although resolutions (measured in dots per inch, or DPI) remained low until the late 1990's. This meant "what you see is what you get" scanning wasn't possible, as scanners lost much of the image in processing. https://www.techwalla.com/articles/the-history-of-computer-scanners

In the ’70s a photo scan sent to a newspaper office could take seven minutes. Excruciatingly slow.

The whole process of scanning 25-30 old pictures at Vicki’s house took about an hour…longer, if you add in the lunch and a long visit between cousins. And each picture wasn’t just a get-the-image-into-the-computer operation: time was taken up “cleaning” the photos and sometimes rescanning them if the first result didn’t turn out well.

My point, though, is that it was relatively fast and easy. The pictures I scanned are quite old, and producing the originals, long ago, was frequently a tedious  process. In the case of a tintype or daguerreotype, applying the chemicals in the right order to fix an image onto a piece of metal took a lot of time. Wikipedia says:

To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treated it with fumes that made its surface light sensitive; exposed it in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting; made the resulting latent image on it visible by fuming it with mercury vapor; removed its sensitivity to light by liquid chemical treatment; rinsed and dried it; and then sealed the easily marred result behind glass in a protective enclosure.

And you ever wonder why nobody in those old photos seemed to be having any fun? Part of that answer is, of course, that people had to be still a little longer than we do today while the image was exposed; but that’s not the whole story, as this great Vox article points out:

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs

Well, back to my visit and those old pictures. Below are a couple that I think will be of interest to Alawine cousins, and I’m offering as well a challenge.

First, these images are on metal, not paper. The first scans are of Rena Alawine, oldest child of Andrew and Lucretia Alawine. She was murdered in the mid-1870s, her assailant never serving time for the deed. For a more in-depth telling of that event, read my previous post about it.

https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_28.html 

The image was produced on metal and is about an inch and a half square.

Rena Alawine, ca 1876-7, lightened and altered image; original about 1.5" square

Rena Alawine original-color image

It’s in a very old case with a little clasp at the side. (See the very top of this post for a view of the back of the case.) Creacie, the third-oldest child of Sam and Maggie Alawine, did not have children herself. After Sam and Maggie “broke up housekeeping,” as it was called in those days—in other words, left their own house and went to live somewhere else, as they got old—they came to Creacie’s home, and there they also left old photos when they died. Creacie preserved the pictures, handed them to Beatrice, her younger sister, who passed them on to Vicki.

From her grandparents Andrew and Lucretia, Creacie would’ve heard first-hand the story of Rena’s death; she identified Rena as the child in these scans. Therefore, the image on the tiny metal plate is from perhaps 1876 or ’77. When I took the scans back to my own house and enhanced them with photo-editing software, to bring out any obscure details, a china-headed doll held in the crook of Rena’s right arm became easily visible. Did the photographer have one along for his child subjects to hold? In those hard times, it wouldn't be all that likely for a toddler to have a store-bought doll.

Considering the tragic details of her life, one can imagine why her parents preserved this image.

The second set of scans here I BELIEVE to be of Andrew Jackson Alawine, my great-grandfather and the father of Rena. For years I heard about a photograph or image of him as a young man—younger than the earliest photo I’d seen, which shows him and Lucretia Wells at some time shortly after their marriage.

Lucretia Wells and Andrew Alawine, ca 1868-71

No one seemed to know where the other picture was.

The problem is that Andrew grew a beard during the Civil War and was never again clean-shaven. So you have to
digitally (or imaginatively) add a beard like the one in those later years to make an accurate comparison.

Several points between the two photos do correlate. First, the young man’s right eye is smaller than his left. The same is apparently true of the bearded, older Andrew. Zoom in on the hairlines and ear lobes of the men in the two images, and they appear also to be similar.

Andrew? in 1861

Andrew in 1868-71

Lightening up the original scan brought out a few more details in the clothing. The fabric in a part of his jacket is wide-woven cloth.

Wide-woven fabric details; button

The bright buttons may not be typical, usual daywear for a young man of that time. Andrew was in the cavalry during the Civil War. Does this resemble a cavalry uniform?

His mother was listed as a seamstress in the 1860 census.

1860 Census Yazoo County MS. Andrew's age may be off a year or two.

Did she sew that uniform—if that’s what it is—for him when he enlisted? —No one can answer this question today, but it’s something to think about.

It’s known that he joined at the age of 16 or a little older; this young man appears to be in his upper teens.

So it’s my guess—but only a guess—that since this tintype was in the same batch of old photos that Creacie saved, along with the one of Rena, and no one else fits the overall profile of this man, the image is likely to be of Andrew Alawine, and therefore from about 1861 or so, a period of time when tintypes were being produced. There was money to be made for an enterprising image-taker who traveled around the states, even into rural areas, giving people a chance to get their likeness on a piece of metal. It was novel, and fascinating; and if you didn’t mind posing for a while, apparently well worth it.

So the challenge for anyone with some facial-recognition software: can you make a determination as to whether this old tintype is likely of Andrew J. Alawine? 

Ælfwine