My Gift of FINDING

Some of you may wonder, if this guy finds these rare photos all the time, why doesn't everybody do it? This guy just goes to Ebay, scrolls down, and buys scores of rare unidentified antique tintypes... every day it seems. How hard could it be?

Well, it's not... if you know how. And if you have a CLUE. I have purchased so many I am sick of it... There are probably more to come, so if you have a good mind and have already studied history to some degree... you might have some success. 

Granted I am long in the tooth, and have been reading and staring at the faces of history as a pastime most of those years, and have been scrolling on Ebay about as long as it has been around...and I did not find most of these until the past few years, when a single seller began to divest himself of his lifelong collection. But there will always be another guy like that out there...

So to clue you in, get you jump-started so to speak...  here is how it has been working, famously, for me.

First of all, I had to discover a decent honey hole. A dealer who is  selling semi-significant historic photographs. If you RECOGNIZE ANYONE, remember that if the seller has one, he may have more... even hundreds. Of course the ideal honey hole is one where somebody is selling a bunch of items and has no clue themselves what they have... and yes, that happens. Old museums, libraries, publishing houses, IGNORANT RELATIVES get rid of unwanted archives all the time.

 So for instance, I recognized some disheveled cowboys whose faces seemed familiar. That means they were probably criminals, since I have always been fascinated with the Old West and the good guys and bad guys. One fellow looked particularly significant... and after the process of elimination, I narrowed his neighborhood to TOMBSTONE. Soon I had him tagged as Ike Clanton. Identifying him helped me identify Tom McClaury, the hunky thug sitting next to him. It helped a lot that soon another tintype came right after of Curly Bill Brocius. It also did not hurt my confidence in my finds that I had already purchased a number of tintypes of Old West characters from the same seller.

But this is just an example of how this all worked... so follow me on this... So now I am alerted, there may be more... well the way that I grew in confidence of my identifications was the incredible comparisons available on GOOGLE search. I gather those images for scrutiny and file them for future reference... 

BUT HERE IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT-  it's not what I put in my files for reference that are so important. It's all the THOUSANDS of images I see while hunting the Internet. While I am searching Curly Bill, the Internet is showing me every person ever recorded that had ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIM. What I have learned is that I have to pay attention to those faces... 

Images are going to often be sold in related batches. If it's a family album... and you have found Curly Bill, you may next be seeing (but not recognizing) images of his girl friend, or his brother, or his boss for sale... and if those faces have ever been recorded... as you seek verification about Bill on GOOGLE search, you are surfing right over them as you look for him. I have learned to look for clues and not to trust the first page of a search... I go three and four deep. Of course GOOGLE has one long page... so go to the bottom!

About this same time I was reading a book by Albert Bigelow Paine... about Lillian Gish, a famous actress during the late 1800's/ early 1900's. Actually Paine is a key to all of these, and I will confess to having an advantage knowing that. No sooner had I begun to read about Gish, "my seller" began to list images of her.  And not just Lillian Gish, but several very important early silent screen actresses. Because I had been brushing up on them, it did not take long to identify y them.

The numbered ones are my finds.

 

 Don't worry, if you have a memory, it will tell you.. "I think I just saw that face..."

 For instance, as I was wrapping up the Tombstone and early movie star finds, still searching the Ebay offerings for historic images I might have overlooked, and researching possible related faces on the Internet, and I had constantly surfed past various images of Teddy Roosevelt. Uncannily, he was linked to both previous groups. The movie stars were closely associated with Broadway, ran in prominent New York circles, as did the Roosevelts. Teddy may have also been the most famous Easterner who "went West," forever associating himself with cowboys and the Wild West. And so many times as I surfed on GOOGLE, I had imprinted on my sub-conscious his pretty little face as a youth. (above) It looks like a cute little kid, but nothing like Teddy Roosevelt.

A rare tintype of the Roosevelt kids... Teddy in the middle about 14 years old... surrounded by his sisters Bamie (left) and Corrine (right). Not sure about the other young man... might be brother Elliott. The girl on far left is Anna Hall, Elliott's future wife. 

 

Then when a tintype appeared with a young fellow who looked like that elfin Roosevelt visage, I was prepared to see its possibilities. I checked it out. Now the seller was unknowingly breaking into his Roosevelts. Big time. This was the largest related batch he ever sold. 

 Teddy Roosevelt's family- a baby pic of him (bottom) and his brother's beautiful wife, Anna Rebecca Hall Roosevelt (center). That's his brother Elliott with the handlebar mustache... and their son Gracie Hall Roosevelt (bottom right).

 

 I had to do a TON of research to stay on top of these. There was a whole batch related to Teddy, and a whole batch related to his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even a batch of FDR's Delano relatives. It kept me busy for weeks. All from one squirrely picture of Teddy Roosevelt. That I would never have recognized without that search for the McClaurys and Clantons.

 Members of the Roosevelt family, including young FDR in center with dog, and tintypes of his future wife, Eleanor (lower right).

Delanos, including FDR's mother, top right.

 

So about the time I was exhausted with Roosevelts, but before they were completely depleted, the seller broke into the next group of unnamed "famous" persons. One of the tintypes was of a very funny looking young woman... dressed so unbecomingly that I told myself, I'm NOT buying that one! But then while researching the Roosevelts, and by now I had learned after studying their genealogy ( absolutely necessary to ID all the images) that the Delano side were Cushman descendants... thus distantly related to me. I also found that FDR was a distant cousin of Laura Ingalls Wilder. And THAT was why the Internet kept throwing Wilder images up during my search for Roosevelts. BINGO- the goofy girl turned out to be Laura's little sister.

 Photos of the Ingalls and Wilder families, made famous by Little House on the Prairie.

And suddenly there were Wilders popping up on this same auction site. That too was exhausting because Charles Ingalls had a bunch of brothers and sisters... and they all had a lot of children... making identification very tedious, since family resemblance made it necessary to note all birth dates... and who even lived to be old enough to be in the picture. I was able to ID most of them... eventually amassing ( I believe) the largest Wilder photo collection outside of a museum. One of the last was a more modern photo of Rose Wilder (1930's), Laura's daughter, who was also a writer and no doubt inherited the Wilder scrapbook...

AND THEN... because I had been alerted, via my research that Rose Wilder had written a biography of Herbert Hoover... I was forewarned and ready when tintypes showed up next of Hoover and his siblings.

I hope by now you see how it works... it feeds itself. The research, if you are into a vein of related images, will clue you in, prepare you to find them. And the images and history you absorb just leads you to the next find... 

Some folks would try to attribute all this to the power of suggestion. Neither of us can prove the other wrong.

The first tintype I found was after reading several books about Adah Isaacs Menken. Those books led me to HUNDREDS of finds, by just showing me famous people that most people are not thinking about.  So start by just reading a lot about your favorite historical character, (within the history of photography!) and this system can work for you!

So, does anybody know the phone number of the Smithsonian?