Mystery Canine Photos

I eagerly opened this envelope of professional quality photos, hoping, as always, to find images of relatives of long ago.  Instead I found a black cocker spaniel dog.

There is really no good explanation.  Nobody was devoted to dogs, bred them, showed them, nothing.  This dog probably did little more than exist as a living decoration in a minimalist household, so one must wonder why these pictures came into being and then survived the ages.

Mystery Photos

This posting is one of several concenring a stack of old photographs that I recently received.  Most are not labeled, so I am attempting to ascertain something about the subjects.

This photograph looks to be professional and from the 1920s, judging by the bob hairstyle and soft makeup.

This photograph is larger than the one above.  I am thinking that these pictures capture the same woman.  This photograph was mounted to a board with the photographer's credentials.

Jay Te Winburn of Montclair, New Jersey was the photographer of the second picture, and perhaps the first.  A little checking for him in the census finds him in Montclair, Essex County, New Jersey in 1920 and 1930, working as a photographer.

1920 census for 563 Bloomfield avenue, Montclair, Essex County, New Jersey

Once the photographer was located and dated, I googled him.  I uncovered several generations of Winburn photographers.  It seems that the Winburn who snapped the above photos specialized in prestigious weddings.

LIFE Magazine
15 July 1940
via Google Books

Finding information on the photographer's main subject, weddings and brides, can help us with the above photos.  The woman or women in the pictures had enough money to have pictures done by a prestigious photographer.  These could be engagement or wedding shots.  So I am looking for a woman in my family tree who was married around 1920 and had enough money to splurge on these photos.  She did not necessarily have to live in or near Montclair, as she could have travelled to Mr. Winburn's studio, or he could have travelled to her.  I have several candidates.  Having the groom in the pictures may have helped.

A few words instead of a picture

Family historians seek to associate a face with the stark facts of life they assemble about people of long ago in order to have more than a mere collection of names, places, and dates.  I love to find photographs of ancestors.  Today we can snap pictures easily on our phones.  Just a generation ago, this was impossible and for generations before them, well, photographs were not very common.  I have several unidentified older photographs of relatives (or dear friends, we may never know), and sites like ebay are filled with beautiful, old, and unmarked photographs of somebody's ancestors.

I am sorting through my finds in a family file from Morristown, New Jersey and was struck by a paragraph in a compiled genealogy submitted by the late Louis Cook in the 1970s and 1980s.  He tells the reader that there are few photos of ancestors before 1900.  This does not mean that I will stop looking and hoping for photographs.  It's as if he just knew that future researchers would want images for the names.  Not to disappoint, he provided us with physical descriptions to fuel the imagination.