In 2011 I inherited an extensive family history archive from my great aunt. She knew my love and respect for our shared history and made special provisions in her will that documents, Bibles, photos and other ephemera were passed on to me.
Through the years I had gone through most of the collection with her, asking her to identify people she knew and help piece together clues about others. If there is one thing I can tell people today it's to please identify people in photos! We often don't think of it, because we know the people in the photos we take. Someday many years from now someone will look at your photos - images that hold specific, special memories - and say "Who is that?" Document, document, document!
Amongst the thousands of photos in my late aunt's collection were many belonging to her grandmother and great grandmother, my great-great grandmother and great-great-great grandmother. My aunt's father (my great-grandfather) had been an only child, as was his mother. This meant for several generations family archives remained concentrated with one person, one branch of the family. Now, after nearly 150 years, they reside with me.
I have many items that belonged to my third great-grandmother, Angelina (Jackson) Sabin. I have her marriage certificate from 1877. I have a diary belonging to her husband, Warren, from the year 1870. I have hymnals and jewelry and ledgers and many things that make her more than a distant ancestor.
One of the most personal and yet enigmatic items is a small photo album that belonged to Grandma Sabin. After more than a century it's spine is tattered and many pages torn. The inside cover still has the pencil inscription: "Angeline Sabin, Toledo, Iowa".
The album is small, with each page designed to contain a single small photo. There are dozens of photos inside in different styles. Some are tintype, some are reproductions of older photos, probably made in the 1880s or 1890s. Only a few have names. Most are unidentified.
Through my own digging and comparing I've discovered the identity of a few people in the album. Out of dozens of images, three have been identified as Grandma Sabin herself as a young woman. In one photo she is with another young girl, presumably one of her sisters. In another, she's a young mother with my great-great-grandmother, Delilah Pearl, as a toddler.
The other photos, unfortunately, remain a mystery.
That's why I'm posting them here. I'm hoping someone out there has the same photos, or photos that can be compared. It is my assumption that most of the people in the album are from the Jackson and Sabin families, though there is at least one labeled as from the Jester family (Grandma Sabin's mother was a Jester). I'll post each image as it's own blog post, along with anything written on the image.
Hopefully someone, somewhere, will see a familiar face.
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