A Dusty Treasure Trove

When we sold my parents' house (my father had died and we decided to bring my 88 year old mother  up to live with us), I found a shoe box on a dusty shelf in a storage closet out in the garage.  It probably had not seen the light of day since my parents had moved to Florida from New York about 30 years earlier.  After the arduous task of getting the house ready to sell (making it shine, getting rid of a lifetime of clutter, countless trips to Goodwill, etc.) we packed up the U-haul with some keepsake furnishings and we brought the shoe box to its new home. When I eventually got around to opening it, I saw that it contained old photos.  Some were familiar ones I remembered seeing when I was young, but oh, there was so much more.  In that box were snapshots of my father as a child, scenes of Roscoe NY, tintypes and dozens of portraits, called Cabinet Cards, taken in professional photography studios in places like Unadilla, Oneonta, Sydney, Elmira and Binghamton.

Samuel Jones
1826-1892

I had done a lot of research filling in my family tree, and with the box of photos, I could finally match faces to names. My great great grandfather's name was Samuel Jones.  He fought in the Civil War.  On the back of the photo above was written (in my father's handwriting): Grandpa Jones' father.

As I started going through the unidentified portraits one by one, some of the faces were so beautiful, so interesting, so full of distinction, that I felt I had been given a gift in the form of a box of dusty photos.  I felt that the people in the photos, the mystery people from the past, were asking to be, they deserved to be, connected with their future -  the present.  I'm sure they would have liked to be able to share their story, their accomplishments, their memory, with their descendants.  And I knew that there were people out there researching their roots in upstate NY who might recognize a family member.  And so I decided to start a blog as a gallery of photos with hopes that someone will recognize a face or a name or a story (as my posts relate my own family's story) and contact me.

Julian Brathwaite [sp]

Based on my family's frequent vacations spent in the Catskills and Adirondacks in the 1960s,  I had always assumed that hardly any black people lived in upstate NY.  So it was surprising to see, in these studio portraits so many people of color! Living in the Catskills so long ago!  And it was even more surprising to see that this box, this collection of photos, contained dozens of portraits and snapshots of white people. I mean, they obviously weren't related to my family so it seemed a little strange. Some are addressed to my father, his mother or his grandmother so they were obviously friends.  Friends and neighbors.  But the dozens of studio portraits of unidentified faces, black and white, will continue to baffle me.