Genealogy, I need help with analyzing an old family photo

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I don’t know if any of these questions can be answered, but I figured I could at least get more informed guesses here than anywhere else.

This is a photograph from the early 1900s. I know the girl is my great aunt. I am trying to establish the identity of the baby and also answer a few other questions. The baby looks incredibly similar to baby pictures of my mother and her brother, and I am trying to figure out if its most like my grandfather or his older brother.

http://img41.photobucket.com/albums/v127/citadel/?action=view&current=32463965.jpg]My great aunt and a baby

  1. About how old does the baby appear (I am a poor judge of baby ages)?

  2. Is the baby more likely male or female (I think its a boy, though the gown makes me think it may be a girl. But didn’t all babies wear the same thing then).

  3. The girl in the photo was born in 1889. My grandfather was born in 1908. There was another boy born in 1904. Is the girl more likely 15 or 19? (I am thinking she looks 14 or 15, but perhaps she is “underdeveloped” by modern standards).

  4. I have always heard stories that my grandfather’s mother was a Chippewa Indian adopted into a white family. (The full story was she was found as a baby in a basket on a railroad track by my gg-grandfather who was a railman) . But I have never had any records, and I dismissed it as a sort of family legend… Do these people look half Native American? I think the girl looks like a Native America, and while the baby does look more “white”; babies tend to be very light skinned compared to older people.

  5. Their outfits look almost like “bedclothes”. Was this pretty much standard everyday clothing of the time?

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…I’m not sure how good this link is

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You may benefit from researching what types of photographs were commonly available in the early part of the century. My memory from art school is that it was later than the early 1900’s when “casual” photos like this one were commonly available (primarily because hand held cameras were not around then). I could be wrong, but I imagine that you would do well to investigate the actual picture historically as an aid to dating it.

The woman doesn’t look like she’s wearing bed clothes to me, she looks like she’s wearing a dress or blouse, skirt and apron. Given the location (outside) and the fact that the baby is not wearing shoes, I am wondering if the baby is of an age to not yet be walking (just a guess here).

The folks do not strike me as ethnic Native Americans, but I’m so sure you can tell just by looking.

Good luck!