In part 1 of this post, I introduced a Civil War photo album that had been owned and put together by Lewis and Ruth Black, sometime around the Civil War or just afterwards. The album has spaces for 24 photos, and 23 of these spaces are filled with cartes de visite photos.

In order to determine when, where, and why the album was put together, I carefully removed each of the contained photos and scanned each of them, both front and back sides, to look for clues. In this post, I’ll present the resulting scans and will try to determine who these people are, and when and where the photos were made. Continue reading →

A couple of years ago, along with a boxful of other family history items from the Black, Edel, and possibly Shearer/Scherer lines, my father passed on a 19th century photo album filled to capacity with what appear to be Civil-War-era photographs.

The album has spaces for 24 photos—cartes de visite, to be precise, or CdVs—and all but one of these spaces is filled with a CdV. Several of these CdVs are mass-produced images of Civil War military leaders, but the rest appear to be photos of family members and/or friends.

I’d like to show you the album and then try to determine who is pictured among its pages, when the album was created, and who might have owned and/or created the album. This post will serve as the record of my research efforts towards answering these questions. Continue reading →