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?

 

The Proof! A Random Identification

Perhaps a year after this incredible tintype cascade began, I finally got a tangible clue, a fact which could prove everything. A tintype was offered for sale which actually had an I.D.... and a whopper of one.

 Master James G. Blaine Jr. and Pinkerton Supervisor Robert Linden.

Offered on ebay, by the same seller from whom I had purchased hundreds of images, was an intriguing photo of a bearded man and a little boy. I had already been studying the Pinkerton detectives because of a number of old photographs already acquired from this person, so I immediately recognized Robert J. Linden, Pinkerton Supervisor who was based in Philadelphia. It was Linden who was in charge of the the famous investigation of the “Molly Maguires,” an Irish terrorist group who had made life hard for the Pennsylvanian “Captains of Industry” in the 1870's. Linden and his men brought the terrorists to Justice. It was his face, but unfortunately he was not the person identified on the back of the photo.

Written on the photo was the name of James G. Blaine Jr.. He was the namesake of “Blaine of Maine,” U.S. Congressman, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of State and even 1884 Presidential candidate James G. Blaine. Junior was born in 1868 and appears in this photo to be around eight or nine years of age... placing the time of the pose sometime around 1877.

This was when the Molly Maguires were captured and prosecuted under Robert Linden's leadership around 1877 and 1878. The connection here is that the crimes perpetrated by the Irish- American miners were done against two companies, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia & Reading Coal and Mining Company, in which James G. Blaine possibly had interests, if only political. Blaine had invested in Railroad stocks and was so compromised in these activities that he was even accused of taking bribes from the Union Pacific Railroad. These accusations and their veracity nearly cost him the Republican nomination for the presidency, and probably cost him the election.

But before all of that happening, It would have been considered a great honor for Linden and this little boy, the son of the congressman and railroad advocate and investor to be allowed to pose with the famous Pinkerton man, and especially after twenty men were hung for murders and terrorism against the mines and railroads of Pennsylvania.

Of course, I knew little of this when I purchased the image, only that James G. Blaine was someone concrete whose life paths might then prove my identification of Linden, a truly famous lawman. That Blaine and Linden might have known each other is a safe presumption, and given the name of Blaine Jr. on a tintype which very likely includes Robert J. Linden, this was the first assurance that I had been correct in the other Pinkerton identifications of previous purchases.

This one tintype suggested many things. If it were related to the others, and from the same collection, it suggested that I had stumbled into a photograph collection which very possibly belonged to an influential person, or at least someone akin to one. Someone who at the very least knew the Blaines and perhaps this famous Pinkerton man.

My own experience and reasoning told me that people are more likely to label a photo with the name of someone less familiar, someone who might be significant, but not a name common among them. Someone they or others might be less likely to recognize. People notoriously failed to label individuals everyone in their immediate circle were assumed to recognize.

So then I launched my theory forward... that this was just one of a batch of photos related to other Pinkerton men, collected by a Pinkerton man or Pinkerton staff person or someone interested in or associated with Pinkerton men. Posing with the Blaine boy was a minor honor for the Pinkerton men, who protected and prosecuted the most famous people in the Country. The photo fit well with a dozen or so others I had purchased which featured various famous Pinkerton detectives, and in fact many members of the Pinkerton family.

Comparing the others, which featured the most noted Pinkerton operatives known to the public, I concluded that it might have been a collection made by one of their fans, a person influential enough to ask for and attain these rare tintypes. It was a clever strategy, as tintypes had fallen out of favor, were considered to be of inferior quality, and anyone who had been photographed would part with them, having had better photographs made. These images might easily have been requested by someone like Speaker Blaine, or Linden, but also someone like Mark Twain, of whom I had also acquired images as well of his family and friends.

The circle of possibilities was tightening. Almost all of the images could have been of persons known to Mark Twain, if not people he had actually met, and perhaps even traded photos with him. Mark Twain lived conveniently in New York, and regularly entertained the most famous, most influential persons of the Victorian age, right in his living room. Once he combined his legacy with his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, that circle widened to encompass the most important personalities known to Western Culture. Paine wrote biographies of the most prominent people Twain knew, including Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist who had his own private and public war with... James G. Blaine. In fact it was Nast's cartoons which were credited to have destroyed Blaine's candidacy.

Now it was about this time that I had to really ask myself some hard questions. I was either having some incredible luck, or this tintype “treasure trove” was unfolding like a bizarre delusion in some kind of parallel universe. What were the chances of my identifying scores of photographs, without any ID's, which were believable look-alikes of very famous people, who, and this was important, knew or were in some way related to one another?

This became a maddening investigation of those popular “degrees of separation.” Truly the Victorian era was a “small world.” And now it was swallowing me.

The odds were almost impossible. It became hard to believe that these images were NOT what they appeared to be! I had spent most of my adulthood scanning Ebay for rare images. You find a rare image of a historical person about one in 5000. In the meantime, there are hundreds of look-alikes. Old photographs which look like somebody you recognize, but which do not stand the test of close scrutiny. I had found that first one, totally by accident while killing time, and since then had become addicted to daily scanning the auctions with the hunch that there were probably more. And I was right. Eventually it became almost commonplace to discover the uncommon.

Finally, after so many purchases and educated guesses, all without any authentication, I had an image that claimed, somewhat obscurely, to be of someone plucked from the ashes of history. James G. Baine Jr.. A young solemn-faced lad who grew up under the shadow of one the most powerful men in the United States; Who as the son of such would have grown up around the most important and recognizable individuals to ever be captured on a tintype... the persons staring up at me from hundreds of tintypes...and little James G. Blaine was telling me that he and many of the others were unknown visages lost to history, and that I was not in some kind of self-delusional odyssey.

Little James G. Blaine Jr. had become my historical link to a fabulous find, of epic importance, and the doorkeeper to obscure or unknown histories and mysteries. They would emerge as I researched the images, and at least for me, would not just bring history alive, but would fill my life as if I had stepped into Alice's Wonderland of oddball historical oddities. The faces were familiar, but the stories they told were as original as the tintypes they slept in.

It was huge and yet it was a microcosm of extraneous history, which nobody would care to exhume after all these years. Little details about giants in our American story, details that only their children would remember or cherish... now resurrected for my- and your edification.

Somehow I think, or at least I fantasize that these images were entrusted to me because I could see them, enter into them, and ultimately glean one last morsel of wisdom from each them. And primarily because I was able and willing to share them with you.

So here you are.