Category: Sepia Saturday

This was just too good of a match to pass up for Sepia Saturday!  The prompt image is from the Cornish Fishing Village of Clovelly, and I’ve long assumed that my image above is from a town in Cornwall as well though I don’t know the exact town.  My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Battin, brought this over from England and put it in a big red velvet photo album  along with other treasured cabinet card photos.  The photos in the album range from the 1880s to 1910 or thereabouts, and only a few are labelled on the back.  This photo, unfortunately, falls in the unlabeled set, but it’s a favorite of mine.  I’d probably put the date right around 1900 based on the women’s dresses.  Jessie left England around 1890, so this may have been taken after she left and sent to her in the USA to remind her of home.  Unfortunately, there aren’t enough identifying landmarks to tell exactly where it was taken though and that may remain a mystery forever since I’m sure the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years.  There isn’t even a photographer’s mark on the back – it’s just a photo mounted to an unremarkable plain piece of cardboard.  If I were a betting woman, I’d wager this was sent from her hometown of Lawhitton, but it could be from any one of her friends or family that lived elsewhere.

There’s a lot  to love about the photo – the dog sitting near the doorway on the left.  The two girls standing just about in the center of the photo.  The horse-drawn cart going down the street.  The curious bystanders peering around each other to watch the photographer.  The disembodied hand sticking out of the doorway on the left.  The mystery of this photo may never be solved, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying this photo without knowing all the details!

This week for Sepia Saturday, our prompt photo showed two children feeding a lamb, taken from the Dutch National Archives.  Well, what a better week to show a photo of Dutch children feeding a goat!  I’ve put up the back of the photo too, even though I can’t make out the handwriting enough to translate it with Google Translate.  There was no label on the page or on the photo to indicate who the children are, and there are even a few photos of them!  They don’t look familiar, so I’m going to guess they may have been friends who lived near Uithuizen in the Netherlands where my husband’s grandmother grew up.  The little girl on the far left does appear to be feeding the rather eager goat being held by the boy on the right who is wearing a pair of coveralls.  There’s also a younger child standing just behind that boy on the right making for four children and a woman who may possibly be their mother.   For a date, I’d be guessing possibly  late 1930s or  early 1940s based on the older woman’s clothes and the  date range of the other photos in the same album.  I haven’t solved any mysteries this week, but I did get a chance to share a nearly perfect match to our prompt photo this week, so that’s okay with me!

Our Sepia Saturday prompt image this week featured a photo of a group of Mennonite women ironing, dated 1951.  Here I have a single woman and while it doesn’t look like she’s ironing, she’s doing something in the kitchen area, and there’s laundry hanging on a line, so it works for me!  Plus, it’s probably dated about to the same year.  The back is unlabeled, so I don’t know who the woman in the photo is.  It’s likely that Leon Kitko, my grandfather, took the photo, but by  1951, his mother’s hair was already mostly grey based on other photos, so I don’t think this was her.  There are two boys’ shirts hanging on the line in the photo, so if it was taken later (1957 or so?), it means those may be the shirts for my father and uncle, but that’s definitely not the interior of the place they were living (I don’t recognize the wallpaper) and the woman doesn’t appear to be a match for my grandma.  So, I’m stumped!  Either way, it’s a neat photo, taken candidly, of daily life.  The woman has a rather fancy sheer apron on, but there are some pretty dirty socks hanging on the rack by the wash tub.  There’s something about the fact that this was photographed probably by my sneaky grandfather being silly against the fact that there’s a really neat scene captured here that I just love, and I’m glad I could share it with you this week even if we haven’t quite figured out the identity of the mystery woman.