Photo Consultation Part III – Vanasse Family

This blog post is the third and final article of a three-part series in which I write about the help I received from photo detective Maureen Taylor during a recent photo consultation. For the two previous installments, see Photo Consultation with Maureen Taylor and Photo Consultation Part II – Pierre Janvry dit Belair.

This picture of my Vanasse great-aunts and uncles (my father’s maternal relatives) was sent to me as a digital image by my cousin Nancy in the spring of 2013.

Seated at the front (left to right) are George, his sister Corinne (Cora) and his brother William (Willie). At the back (left to right) are his sister Agnes (Aggie), his wife Louise, his brother David (Dave), his sister Cecilia (Celia), and his brother Joseph (Joe). Missing from the group are parents Olivier and Elisabeth, and sisters Mary and Julie (my grandmother).

Here are Maureen’s thoughts about this picture:

• A studio portrait (painted background, heavy furniture, carpet).
  
• It could be part of a series of photos taken at the same time.
  
• Presumably a wedding photo, since Louise is less likely to be included with the family while unmarried to George.
  
• The men all wear different collars and ties. Joe (back, far right) appears to be “a bit of a dandy”, judging by the style of his collar.
  
• Joe has a protective hand on Willie’s shoulder.
  
• Cora (centre, front) and Celia (back, right) are fashionably dressed. Maureen added that she’s never seen Cora’s style of necklace.
  
• Aggie (back, far left), who’s about 14 years old, is “dressing younger than her age”. Her hair (in banana curls) and dress reflect a “very youthful style”. She could be dressed by an older person instead of having the chance to make her own fashion choices.
  
• Louise’s “dress is way too big”. She seems to have borrowed it from someone “taller and much larger in the chest”.

My impressions:

I believe this photo was taken in June 1920, when George (born in 1891) married Louise Potvin in Bourget, Russell County, Ontario. Louise’s dress with its shiny, heavy fabric, so different from what her sisters-in-law are wearing, suggests the picture was taken on a special occasion. Until Maureen pointed out how big Louise’s dress is, I hadn’t noticed how much fabric appears on her left sleeve.

If I’m correct about the year, the Vanasse brothers and sisters gathered for this photo less than two years after the end of the Great War (1914-1918). Willie (born in 1893) and Joe (born in 1898) both served overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Poor Willie came back home shell-shocked and spent a number of years in veterans hospitals. I get the feeling that Willie and Joe were particularly close, and that Joe feels protective of his elder brother. I also think that Celia (born in 1895) is close to her youngest brother Dave (born in 1903), since she’s holding onto his arm.

Dave’s skin is darker than any of his brothers and sisters. His skin tone might be due to genetics: both his parents are great-grandchildren of Aboriginal women.

I'm grateful that my cousin Nancy shared this wonderful Vanasse family photo with me. I dearly loved my grandmother Julie, who died when I was eight and half years old. After her death, I felt privileged to have known her sisters, particularly Celia, who I used to visit at her home in Ottawa when I was there at university.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Photo Consultation Part II – Pierre Janvry dit Belair

Last week, I wrote about a photo consultation I had with Maureen Taylor by telephone and how she helped me better understand three family photos I had submitted to her by email.

I thought that article would be the only one I’d post on my blog about that conversation. I planned on transcribing the rest of the notes I made during our phone call and then file them for future reference. It occurred to me, however, that if I put those notes away, who would see them and get to know about the people and the extra details that Maureen found in the pictures except maybe only me?

That’s when I decided to share with my readers what Maureen had to say about the other two photographs. After all, that’s the point of my having a genealogy blog – to share my ancestors with others.

Therefore, I’m focusing on the second of the three photos this week, and the third photo and its information will appear next week.

This photo of my paternal great-grandfather Pierre Janvry dit Belair (1851-1941) was given to me many years ago by a cousin. All I knew about it was that it was a picture of Pierre. I speculated that he was perhaps photographed before he married in September 1879, because of his youthful appearance. I don't know when or where it was taken (possibly not too far from his hometown of Ste-Cécile-de-Masham, near Hull, Quebec) and I don't know what led him to want to be photographed.

These are Maureen’s thoughts about Pierre and the picture:

• The original photo is a tintype. (Maureen explained how she knew that, but I didn’t write it down, and I’ve already forgotten what she told me.)

• Pierre is wearing 1870s attire, judging by the wide lapels of his jacket and his shawl-collared vest. The piping or twisted braiding on his vest is also a feature of 1870s men clothing.

• He has two different eyes: his right eye seems to be normally lidded, but his left eye has a droopy upper lid. Maureen didn’t give any opinions as to the reason for Pierre’s droopy eyelid (like a medical condition). She wondered, though, if it could be due to the photographic process.

• Pierre has a strong jaw and an advancing hairline.

• He appears to be wearing a pinkie ring on this left hand, which rests on a thick book, perhaps the Bible.

If Pierre really has a droopy eyelid, I wonder if he could have had something called ptosis – drooping of the eyelid. [1] Ptosis can be caused by “a variety of conditions include aging, diabetes, stroke, Horner syndrome, myasthenia gravis, or a brain tumor or other cancer that affects nerve or muscle reactions”. Other causes could be a growth (like a stye), nerve damage, or normal variation. [2] Pierre was 89½ years old when he passed away, so I don’t think he had diabetes, tumor or cancer when he was younger (he was about 20 to 27 years old in the photograph). The only other photo I have of my great-grandfather is the one taken of him at his daughter Mathilde’s wedding in 1921, but that picture isn’t clear enough for me to tell in what condition his eyelids were.

Sources:

1. MedlinePlus, database, National Institutes of Health (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/1111.htm: accessed 9 October 2014), “Ptosis, drooping of the eyelid”.

2. MedlinePlus, database, National Institutes of Health (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003035.htm : accessed 9 October 2014), “Eyelid drooping”.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Photo Consultation with Maureen Taylor

I spent yesterday afternoon with Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective.

Well, actually, it was part of an afternoon and we spoke on the phone – she at home in Rhode Island and me at home in British Columbia. I should also add that Maureen had been scheduled to speak last weekend at the Kelowna and District Genealogical Society’s conference (in Kelowna, British Columbia), as well as do photo consultations during that time. (See Off to Kelowna for a Genealogy Conference.) Unfortunately, she had to cancel her appearance almost at the last minute. Instead, she offered to do phone sessions for those who had pre-booked with her. I still wanted my photos looked at, so I emailed her and we picked a day and time for us to meet on the telephone.

I chose three family photographs and emailed digital copies to Maureen ahead of time. There were a picture of my grandfather Fred Belair (possibly in the 1920s), one of his father Pierre (possibly in the 1870s), and one of my grandmother Julie’s siblings (about 1920).

Maureen started with the photo of my Pépère Fred. (I’ve already featured this particular photo on my blog about two years ago; see Sepia Saturday: 3 November 2012.) I gave her some background information about when and where he worked during his early years, and told her that the picture was a photo of a rather small photo.

Fred Belair (centre, in light overcoat and hat)

Maureen explained that the men in it were of various ages, that they were well dressed, and that although the flat caps some of them wore stayed in fashion for a long time, the fact that they were oversized and “big floppy hats [made them] common in 1918”. She felt that these were average people who had possibly “been out and about” when they were photographed. It was difficult to say if the picture was taken in Canada or in the USA. (I told her that Fred had once told me that he had worked in Wisconsin and Minnesota shipyards during World War I.) As for why they might have posed among logs, she said that people were photographed in all kinds of places.

Maureen then spent a good amount of time analyzing the next two photos. I loved how she pointed out bits of details that were obvious to her but that I had missed whenever I had looked at them.

I don’t know if Maureen could tell that I had big smile on my face as she spoke and that I found everything she shared with me so fascinating and helpful!

I really got my money’s worth during the consultation. I highly recommend Maureen Taylor and her photo expertise!

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.