Photo of my ancestor

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I visited my parents over the easter holidays, I found some old family photos. I have problems with identifying this one:

One of my ancestors in uniform

I’m sorry that the quality isn’t great. What do you think, could the guy in the middle be my great great grandfather, born 1859?
The last photo seems to be from around the turn of the century.

Would you agree that someone born 1838 or 1839 would be too early?
I have photos of several other ancestors, but this one seemed most promising.

Perhaps someone even knows something about the uniform - it should be Prussian and from the pre-WWI empire, that’s all I know.

2

What’s the approximate date on the first photo?
Just from comparing the two, the guy in the middle’s ears don’t match your great-great grandfather. The eyebrows seem to match, either, nor the angle of the nostrils.

3

Unfortunately I don’t know that. All I know is that it’s the one in the middle, and it’s one of my ancestors. My grandmother knew which one, but my father doesn’t anymore.

4

Here are some of the other candidates:

The son of the one above, born 1886
Another great grandfather, born 1879 The same one, photo taken 1915

Of course my grandmother might have been wrong, especially if it was a relative of her husband.

5

Huh. Your GG grandfather appears to be Bee Gee singer Barry Gibb.

6

Mr. 1879 looks closest, but the nose still bugs me. Maybe it’s the camera angle.

7

Yes, I think you are right, but his face and posture seem a bit unnatural and exaggerated. His eyebrows are raised and the nose looks as if his head is tilted backwards. At first I thought the head shape was different, but now the difference doesn’t look that big.

8

I’m no historian, but yeah, that one (the clothes, beard, and haircut) looks like photos I’ve seen from the 1880’s and 1890’s, which would make the man in his 20’s or 30’s, so he could be the GGF born in 1859.

Great pictures! It says something though, that no one wrote names on the back of the photos. “No one’s gonna care about this 150 years from now.”

9

No, likely they assumed that everyone would always know who was in the photo, so saw no need to write that information on the back.

10

That too. :slight_smile:

And what a silly assumption it is. Do we think we’re going to live forever? But what a chore, writing names on all those photos. Sigh.

11

Yeah, but in the early days of photography, they didn’t have a kajillion snapshots. Photos were somewhat like getting a painting done, and one does not forget that it’s grandma’s scowling visage hanging above the mantle. If they thought of future generations, they likely imagined that family photographs would always be cherished and the information passed down.

Sitting around the family photo album used to be a form of recreation before television. They couldn’t imagine that one day we’d have boxes and boxes of photographs that we virtually ignore and that we wouldn’t take time to teach our children who every subject of each photo was.