Photograph of a Great Great Grandfather

I have my first picture of a great great grandfather, Abraham Brewer Duryea.  Abraham was born in 1878 in Pound Ridge, Westchester County, New York to Stephen C Duryea and Mary Evenshirer.  He was named for his maternal grandmother's brother.  In 1898, Abraham married Nellie Cummings, the daughter of William Cummings [still a tail end in my tree] and Anna Hyser.

The negative and cover, with a hand-written note, was among pictures given to me by my aunt.  Love you Aunt Marion!  I learned quickly in my pursuit of old photographs that most photo developing places cannot develop the old negatives.  The place I usually use in Verona has closed down.  I finally located a local business that could develop the negative in Montclair, the Montclair Center Camera Exchange.

Standing, left to right:  Harold Duryea, Alvina Wrage (Harold's wife), Nellie Cummings, Abraham Duryea.
Children of Harold and Alvina.  Kneeling man:  a neighbor.

Off I went to my grandmother's Duryea cousin, who was most pleased to see this photograph.  This photograph was probably made around 1940 at Christmas.  We laughed when he identified the kneeling man as a neighbor- I was trying to fit him into the family tree.


I have a picture of Nellie in her later years, having tea.

The eBay photograph of Garrett S Duryea that I acquired a while back, if correctly marked, would be Abraham's father's brother.  See a similarity?

Photographs of Ancestors

Photographs were added to my decorative family tree on the wall.  Acquiring the photographs and identifying the subjects has taken years. 

Living or Dead, Preserved Images

I stumbled across some post-mortem, or momento mori, photographs online from the mid to late 1800s.  These were photographs made after the person had died, or when they were deathly ill, in order to have a preserved image of the person- perhaps the only photograph ever taken of the person.

So naturally I went through my photo collection with a new goal:  finding post-mortem photos.  At first, I thought that any of the pictures could have been of dead people because nobody smiled for pictures in the 1800s.  Most of the facial expressions are depressed at best.

In the Bishop album, I found a tintype of two boys that might be a post-mortem.  The bases of stands are visible behind both boys.  These stands held up dead people for the picture.  The boy on the right is not posing his hands.  His expression is vacant.  The hat is straight, but his head is crooked, as if he was propped up and then someone stuck the hat on his head.  Is the boy on the left also dead?  Maybe he alive and holding up the other boy, or he is dead and his hands are fastened.

Notice the bases of the stands behind the boys.

I have no idea who these people are.  What would be useful would be finding out who these boys are and when they died.  That information could tell us if this is indeed a post-mortem picture.

Anyone have any opinions?