Giving Thanks for Recent Endeavors

Photo by Geranimo on Unsplash

I went on an almost 2-week road trip recently. I made a very interesting triangle on the map - I drove 1200 miles to my sister’s house, then 400 miles to my mother’s, then 900 miles home.

I had planned, while at my mother’s, to get a good look at the Civil War-era ambrotypes (to confirm they are in fact ambrotypes) and to grab the documents I had scanned the last time I visited but couldn’t bring back due to space in my carry-on luggage. I ended up also labeling and scanning the photos (with my mother’s assistance) from two photo albums as well as a few hundred slides and negatives from my grandfather’s photography collection. I saw pictures of relatives I had only heard of before!

I left my mother with the task of labeling the photos in an older album (that pre-dates me) as well as a whole box of photos that had been found in my grandmother’s house 20 years ago. Next time I visit, whenever that is, I’ll scan those.

Getting the photos into a digital format and labeling the older ones while my mother can still tell me who is in the picture has me feeling extremely accomplished.

And the Civil War-era photos? I’m even more convinced now that they’re actual ambrotypes but also that the damage was unintentional. It looks like someone attempted to remove the glass from the frame, not realizing the image is printed on the glass and their finger grabbing it is what caused the damage. Up close, in person you can see the outer part of the fingerprint at the edge of the “scratches”. It was probably a thumb or the finger slid.

The damaged Lincoln ambrotype.

The darkening damage is probably temperature or moisture related given its creep in from the edges on both images.

You can also, in person see through the image to the scratches on the wood of the frame behind the picture. My mom was hoping we could restore the picture but it’s not scratched out, the actual layer of printing is gone from the glass. I assume there’s no restoring it without a negative.

There’s also likely nothing behind the glass - and there’s no apparently safe way to take it apart to check for a photographer’s mark at the edges under the metallic frame. The frames are actually in worse shape than my mother had alluded to.

So we may never know who took them, exactly when, or who the men are. Which makes me more thankful for the amount of digitization we accomplished during my visit.

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For those of you in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving!