Monthly Archives: June 2024

John Nusbaum Album: More Philadelphia People—Family, Friends, or Who Knows?

Posted on by
13

Having experienced some disappointment with the first batch of Philadelphia photographs from the Nusbaum album, I brainstormed with Ava about how to select the next group. In selecting the next group, I went through the album page by page, starting with the front of the second page. I looked for those that showed full body shots so that Ava would have more clothing to work with in dating the photographs. I also decided that since the photographs tended to be grouped on each page by photographer, I would select one from each page taken by a particular photographer in the hope that there would be some connection between the person I’d selected and the others whose photographs had been taken by that photographer and placed on the same page.

The second page in the album had one photograph taken in Philadelphia:

Since this photograph was taken by Robert Keely, the same photographer who took three of the photographs on the first page, I already knew the background and possible dating of this photograph to be around 1863-1864 (see my prior posts). Ava found additional evidence here in the fringed chair, which was introduced in 1864. She estimated that the little girl was about six years old so born in 1858.1 I theorized that she could be Miriam Nusbaum, John and Jeanette’s second daughter, who was born in 1858. She would have been my three-times great-aunt, Frances Nusbaum’s little sister. Can I be positive? No, since I have no known photograph of Miriam. But given the dating and the location and its placement on the second page of photographs, I think it’s likely.

I then turned to this page in the album. All the photographs on this page were taken by the same photographer, Edward P. Hipple of 820 Arch Street, Philadelphia. Three are head shots and one is a full body photograph of a man.

I asked Ava to analyze the photograph in the upper right.

Ava dated this photograph as taken in about 1863. She wrote, “Hipple operated a studio at 820 Arch Street from 1862 to 1866. In 1865, he opened a second studio in Norristown. Since only the Philadelphia studio is on the reverse of this photo, it is assumed that this is prior to the Norristown studio being added. The lack of a tax revenue stamp places the date before 1864.”  Ava also estimated that the woman in that photograph was about 25 years old, giving her a birthdate of about 1838.2

That conclusion sent me back to my family tree to see if I could find a woman born in about 1838 who was living in Philadelphia in 1863. The choices were limited. My great-great-grandmother Frances was born in 1845 and was living in Philadelphia in 1863, but Ava did not believe the photograph was of Frances, if we assume that the woman on the first page of the album was Frances. But we can’t be 100% certain. Ava tried AI, and it showed a high degree of similarity to the woman in the clip of the video of the portrait of Frances.

The only other family member who could have fit those criteria was Eliza Wiler, the daughter of Caroline Dreyfuss, Jeanette’s sister, and Moses Wiler. Eliza was born in 1842 in Harrisburg, but by 1863 she was married and living in Philadelphia. Eliza had one younger brother Simon (1843) and two younger sisters, Fanny (1846) and Clara (1850). Ava suggested that the four photographs on this page could be a father and his children. Perhaps then this is Moses Wiler at the bottom left with his son Simon and two of his daughters, Eliza and either Fanny or Clara. Maybe. But maybe not.

Turning to the next two pages, there are eight photographs all taken by another Philadelphia photographer, Frederick Gutekunst at 704 & 706 Arch Street, Philadelphia. Here are those two pages:

Ava had this to say about Gutekunst:

Gutekunst had a very prestigious studio in Philadelphia. He has been described as “America’s Most Famous Civil War Era Photographer.” Gutekunst photographed many famous people including Gen. Ulysses Grant, Major General George McClennan, Gen. Philip Sheridan, Walt Whitman, Henry W. Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln as well as other Civil War era celebrities and ordinary Union soldiers both before and around the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. He also photographed images from the Gettysburg battlefield itself.3

Who were these people photographed by this famous photographer? I asked Ava to focus on the woman in the upper left of the first page of Guntekunst photos since it was a full body shot with lots of clothing to help with dating the photo.

Ava thought that the woman was in her late 20s, 28-30, and that the photograph was taken between 1862 and 1864, meaning the woman was likely born in the early 1830s. Ava added these notes to her analysis:4

The woman in this photograph is wearing a ring, though it is on the wrong finger to be a wedding ring. Her hair and dress are also from this same time period.  The dark velvet applique trim on her skirt appears to have been added to an already made dress.  While there is no direct evidence that this has any meaning at all, it could be interpreted, given the time period, that this trim was added as a sign of mourning.

From the following page, I also selected a woman in a full body shot, the one at the lower right.

Ava thought this photograph was also taken between 1862 and 1864 and that this woman was a bit older than the one in a similar dress on the prior page. Comparing their clothing, Ava wrote, “Their dresses are similar, though this woman’s dress has Pamela sleeves which were fashionable at the time. The ruffles on her skirt have no added velvet trim.”5 If this woman was in her early thirties, she would have been born between about 1827 and 1830 or so.

I was at a total loss. There just weren’t any people on my family tree born in the late 1820s, early 1830s who were living in Philadelphia in the early 1860s. John and his siblings were too old; their children were too young. Jeanette Dreyfuss had two sisters born in the 1820s, Caroline in 1822 and Mathilde in 1825, and Mathilde was a widow after her first husband Maxwell died in 1851. But by 1862 she was remarried and presumably not wearing mourning clothes. As for all the other people on those two pages, I have no clues. They all look like adults in the 20s and 30s to me so also born in the 1830s and maybe 1840s, but who they could be is a mystery. Maybe family members, maybe not.

There were two more Philadelphia photographs I asked Ava to analyze, both on this page, the next one in the album:

I asked her to look at the little girl in the upper right and the couple on the lower left. Both were taken by yet another Philadelphia photography studio, Gihon & Jones, John L. Gihon and Alfred T. Jones, at 812 Arch Street, Philadelphia. Ava’s research found that Gihon and Jones were only in partnership at 812 Arch Street for one year, 1869-1870. She also concluded that the girl’s dress was from 1870. Since she thought the girl was between ten and twelve years old, she posited that she was born between 1857 and 1860.5

That means that this could be another photograph of Frances Nusbaum’s sister Miriam, who was born in 1858 and living in Philadelphia in 1870. Comparing this photograph to the one on an earlier page that also was possibly Miriam, I can see some similarity. Or it could be Lottie Nusbaum, the youngest child of John Nusbaum and Jeanette Dreyfuss and Frances’ youngest sibling. Lottie was born in 1863, however, so would have only been seven in 1870. Or…this could be any number of cousins or friends of the family.

1864 born about 1858 Philadelphia could be Miriam Nusbaum

As for the couple in the bottom left, Ava thought the man was around 21, the woman a bit younger, and that the photograph was taken in the year that Gihon and Jones were partners, 1869. That meant the man and woman were born around 1848-1850 or so. Ava ruled out that this was Bernard Seligman and Frances Nusbaum. That left numerous possibilities—too numerous to list and too speculative to list. Could be family, could be friends. We have no way of knowing.

At this point I decided to turn to the photographs from Sante Fe and stop trying to identify anyone in the Philadelphia photographs. There were only six taken in Santa Fe, and there were far fewer relatives who lived in Santa Fe during the mid-19th century. I figured these would be far easier to identify. I wish that were so.

  1. This and other information I received from Ava came from her second report on the album.  Ava Cohn, Analysis of Nusbaum Album #2, December 22, 2023. ↩
  2. See note 1, supra. ↩
  3. See Note 1, supra. ↩
  4. See Note 1, supra. ↩
  5. See Note 1, supra. ↩ ↩

John Nusbaum Album: Will the real Frances Nusbaum please identify herself?

Posted on by
13

As I wrote in my last post, I learned from Ava’s information and analysis of the photograph that might be John Nusbaum that without a photograph that was labeled “John Nusbaum” to use for comparison, there was no way to know for sure who that man really was.

Turning to the two photographs of women on the first page, I had hoped that the woman at the bottom of the page would be Frances Nusbaum. Let’s look at Ava’s analysis of this photograph:

It was taken by Keely, the Philadelphia photographer who took the photographs of the two men on this page, and, according to Ava, likely in the same time frame (if not at the same time) as those first two photographs, i.e., 1863 to 1864. Ava estimated that the young woman in the photograph would be 20-22 years old, meaning she was born in the early 1840s.1 Frances Nusbaum was born in 1845. She had no older sister, only older brothers. So this could be Frances.

But I have no other photograph of Frances, just a very blurry still from a video taken of a portrait made when she was much older. Ava didn’t find enough similarity between that blurry image and this photograph to conclude with certainty that this was Frances. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The placement on the first page adds weight to the conclusion that this could be Frances, but there is no certainty.

I was further confused about whether this could be Frances when I asked Ava to analyze a different Keely photograph later in the project but worth discussing now. That photograph appears much later in the album, close to the end of the album. But it had a specific inscription on it, one of the very few in the album that did.

The inscription reads “Miss Nusbaum” in one handwriting, and then in a separate hand someone wrote, “Joan’s Great-great-grandmother.” The reference to Joan is almost definitely Joan Seligman, the granddaughter of Arthur Seligman and one of the last people to own the album, according to her granddaughter Jhette. Joan was the great-granddaughter of Frances Nusbaum. Her great-great grandmother with a Nusbaum surname would have been Jeanette Dreyfuss Nusbaum. Could this be either Frances or Jeanette?

Since this was a Keely photograph with no tax stamp, Ava dated it as either before August 1864 or after August 1866; based on the clothing and furniture, she narrowed it down to the earlier period, roughly 1861-1863. She also estimated that the woman in the photograph was a teenager between fifteen and eighteen years old, meaning a birth date between 1843 and 1848.

That meant it could not be Jeanette, who would have been much older than that by 1861, but it could be Frances, who was born in 1845. That seemed the logical answer to me, given the inscription on the back. The misidentification of her as Joan’s great-great-grandmother rather than her great-grandmother seemed minor.

But Ava was skeptical. She did not see a similarity to the woman she thought was Frances on the first page in the album. And she did not see a similarity to the woman in the blurred image from a video of a portrait supposedly of Frances. And she thought it unlikely that if Frances owned the album that her photograph would appear so late in the album.

But what if someone moved the photographs around? What if the photograph on that first page is not Frances? In my mind, the inscription carries more weight than the location in the album, but it’s also possible that the inscription is wrong. Maybe it was a different Miss Nusbaum. Maybe it wasn’t Joan’s ancestor. I don’t know.

Finally, the remaining photograph on the first page, the one I’d hoped was Jeanette Dreyfuss, my three-times great-grandmother, turned out to be the most confusing one of all to identify. It is the very first photograph in the album; it should be of someone very important, you would think. I sure was hoping so.

This photograph was not taken by Keely, who took all the other photographs on the first page, and it was not taken in Philadelphia, but in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My three-times great-grandparents John and Jeanette (Dreyfuss) Nusbaum had lived in Harrisburg from about 1843 until about 1858. Frances Nusbaum, my great-great-grandmother, was born in Harrisburg in 1845. But by 1860 and thereafter, John and Jeanette and their children were living in Philadelphia. Thus, if this photograph was taken when my Nusbaum ancestors were living in Harrisburg, it had to be taken before 1860.

But Ava concluded that this photograph was taken after 1866. The photographer who took this photograph was Christian S. Roshon, located at “No. 424 (Old No. 110) Market Street Harrisburg, Penna.” By tracing the succession of photographers who worked at this location, Ava found that Roshon succeeded a photographer named Robert S. Henderson, who came after David C. Burnite.  Burnite (Burnite and Weldon’s) had been at 110 Market between 1864 and 1866, and Henderson was there with a photographer named Rogers from 1865-1866. That meant that Roshon didn’t occupy that address until 1866 or later, meaning that the first photograph in the album was taken after 1866. My Nusbaum ancestors were in Philadelphia by then, not in Harrisburg.

Since Ava estimated that the woman in the photograph was in her early 20s (20-22), she could not be Jeanette, who would have been far older than that by 1866. She might be Frances, who was 21 in 1866, but since Frances was no longer living in Harrisburg and was married to Bernard by 1866, that seemed unlikely.

So who could this young woman who holds the first spot in the album be? I searched my tree for a relative born in about 1845 who would have been living in Harrisburg in 1866. I could only find two women who came close to fitting into those parameters: Paulina and Sophia Dinkelspiel, daughters of Mathilde Nusbaum (John’s sister) and Isaac Dinkelspiel. Paulina was born in Germany in 1840, and Sophia was also born in Germany in 1849. Both were living in Harrisburg in the late 1860s. They were first cousins to Frances Nusbaum and John Nusbaum’s nieces.

Could that photograph be of Paulina or Sophia? Sure. But is the photo of either one of them? I have no idea. And if it is one of Frances’ cousins/John’s nieces, why would she be the first one in the album? It really doesn’t make much sense to me, but I also can’t disagree with Ava’s expert analysis of the dates of the photograph or the age of its subject.

Also, it’s important to remember that these CDVs could have been taken when someone was visiting from another town. Maybe Frances or someone else went to Harrisburg to visit her cousins and had her photograph taken while there. Of course, once you factor in that possibility, the photographer’s location becomes a less defining factor for identifying who was who in any of the photographs.

I decided to try a different approach with the next set of photographs.

  1. The references to Ava’s analysis in this post all come from her first report, Ava Cohn, Analysis of Nusbaum Album #1, December 16, 2023 ↩

Nusbaum Album: Is this John Nusbaum? Is that Bernard Seligman?

Posted on by
15

After retaining Ava Cohn’s services to help me with the album of photos (“the Nusbaum album”) I’d obtained from an antique dealer in Santa Fe and selecting, with Ava’s advice, where to begin, I waited anxiously to see what Ava could tell me about the album and the first four photos we’d decided to start with, the ones on the very first page:

First page in the Nusbaum album

I had been staring at these over and over while waiting to hear back from Ava. Could the two on top be my three-times great-grandparents Jeanette Dreyfuss and John Nusbaum? Could the two on the bottom be my great-great-grandparents Bernard Seligman and Frances Nusbaum? I was hoping so. Wouldn’t that be a logical assumption to make?

But alas, I quickly learned that hopes and assumptions are not a reliable method for identifying photographs.

Ava started her analysis by providing some background on the album itself. She wrote, “The album was manufactured and sold by Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia. Altemus and Company first published photographic albums in 1862 and remained in business until 1936….The album is one of Altemus’ larger albums, holding four cartes de visite (CDV) photographs per page.  The photographs are CDVs measuring 2 3/8” x 4.”1

One thing that Ava explained is that cartes de visite, as their name suggests, were used as calling cards. When someone visited, they would leave their photograph as a memento of that visit. That meant that, unlike a modern photograph album where most of the photographs are likely to be of family members and close friends, this album could include photographs of anyone who stopped in to visit the Nusbaums and the Seligmans.

Ava shared this poem that illustrates how CDVs were used:

Ashford, Brothers & Co, Album Filler Poem, c. 1865

Ava’s report continued with some observations about the photographs and some of the issues involved in analyzing them, including the fact that most of the photographs in the album show only heads or heads and shoulders of their subjects. Because Ava did not have the ability to see other details of what they were wearing, it would be more challenging to provide exact dating of the photographs.

Nevertheless, Ava was able to reach several conclusions about the dates when the photographs on the first page were taken. She concluded that the three from Philadelphia were taken in the Civil War era, but not between August, 1864, and August, 1866. As she explained, “Tax stamps were issued by Union states and were required to be placed on the backs of photographs from August, 1864 to August, 1866 to raise money for the war effort.”2 Since these photographs did not have tax stamps on them, they had to have been taken either before August, 1864, or after August, 1866.

With that time period in mind, Ava then focused on the specific photographers who took these first four photographs. Three of the photographs on the first page of the album were taken by Robert N. Keely; his address, as indicated on the back of these three photographs, was “N.W. cor. Fifth & Coates Sts., Philadelphia.” Ava found Keely listed in Philadelphia directories at that address or at nearby addresses throughout the 1850s and 1860s and into the 1870s.

Knowing that these three photographs were taken during that era, Ava then focused on the three individual photographs on that first page that were taken by Keely. First, she looked at this one:

Based on her estimate of his age (50 years old) and the possible dating of the photograph between 1863 and 1864, Ava concluded that the man in the photograph was likely born around 1813-1814. John Nusbaum, my three-times great-grandfather was born on November 26, 1814, according to the family bible. Ava and I speculated that the man in the photograph could be John Nusbaum, given those dates and given the placement of the photograph on the first page.

I was excited by this analysis, but also realized that nothing could be certain. Without another photograph of John, we had no truly definitive way of being sure this was in fact John Nusbaum. That was an important first lesson I learned from Ava’s work on the album.

Another photo taken by Keely that appears on the first page of the album is this one:

Philadelphia c 1863, born about 25 years, could be Bernard or a Nusbaum son

I had hoped this was Bernard Seligman. But Ava was not convinced. She dated this photograph in that same 1863-1864 time frame and found that the man was 20-25 years old, meaning the man was born roughly between 1838 and 1844; Bernard was born in 1837 so within some reasonable margin of error of that estimate. But Bernard and Frances didn’t marry until 1865. Would they have had their photographs taken before they were married?

Possibly, but there was another obstacle. When I shared the photographs I do have of Bernard as a young man and as an older man as well as the blurry still from a video taken of his supposed portrait, I could see similarities, but Ava was certain that the man in the album was not Bernard.

 

Bernard Seligman

So who was he? Maybe one of John and Jeanette’s sons? Adolphus was born in 1842, Simon in 1843, and Julius in 1848. It could be any one of them, but I have no photographs of any of them. So who knows… It would make sense that John and Jeanette would have put one of their sons on the first page, but I can’t be certain.

What about the two women on that first page? Were they Jeanette Dreyfuss Nusbaum and Frances Nusbaum Seligman? That will be discussed in the next post.

  1. Ava Cohn, Analysis of Nusbaum Album #1, December 16, 2023 ↩
  2. See note 1, supra. ↩

The Nusbaum Album: An Introduction

Posted on by
17

Some of you may recall that last fall I received a call from an antique dealer in Santa Fe who had in her shop a photograph album with the names John Nusbaum and Frances Nusbaum engraved on the front and rear covers, respectively. I immediately knew that this album had belonged to my three-times great-grandfather John Nusbaum and his daughter Frances, my great-great-grandmother. Frances had married my great-great-grandfather Bernard Seligman and moved from Philadelphia to Sante Fe, where they raised their children, as I told in my family history novel, Santa Fe Love Song.

I agreed to purchase the album and when it arrived, I marveled at the collection of almost two hundred photographs of people I hoped were my relatives—or at least I hoped that some of them would be. But except for a handful of those photographs, there were no labels or names to identify the people in them. Almost all, however, had a photographers’ stamp that indicated where they were taken.

The largest group of photographs (43) were taken in Philadelphia, where John Nusbaum had settled after immigrating from Schopfloch, Germany, in about 1840. He had initially been a peddler traveling throughout Pennsylvania, but eventually settled in Philadelphia and established a dry goods store there. He married Jeanette Dreyfuss, another German immigrant, and had six children, my great-grandmother Frances being the third child and oldest daughter. Thus, I assumed many of the Philadelphia photographs were of John and his family as well as of other family members and friends. But who was who? I had no idea.

Not surprisingly, the next largest group of photographs were taken in Germany, including some taken in Mainz and some in Bingen, the two larger cities closest to Gau-Algesheim where Bernard Seligman and his siblings were born and raised. There were also photographs taken in other German cities, such as Stuttgart, Berlin, and Wiesbaden.

There were eight photographs taken in Santa Fe, where Frances Nusbaum had moved with her husband Bernard and their three older children in about 1870. Their youngest child Arthur Seligman was born in Santa Fe, but my great-grandmother Eva Seligman was born in 1866 in Philadelphia.

Three photographs were taken in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and several were taken in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, two locations where John and Jeanette’s siblings lived in Pennsylvania, so I assumed that those photographs were likely of those Nusbaum/Dreyfuss cousins. The remaining photographs were taken in other places such as New York City; Montgomery, Alabama; Wheeling, West Virginia; Peoria, Illinois; and St. Louis, Missouri.

Each page in the album has four slots for photographs. On the first four pages of the album, there are two photos, back-to-back, in each slot so that you cannot see the reverse of the photos without pulling them out of the slots. Then starting on the fifth page in the album, there are only four photos on each page, and the reverse of those photos shows through on the back of the slot on the back of the page.

What it took me a long time to realize is that all the photos squeezed into the back of those on the first four pages are photographs from Germany. I think that these photographs from Germany may have been added once all the other slots were filled. They likely belonged to Bernard Seligman and were added after he married Frances. I will get to these photographs in a later post, but my reason for mentioning this here is to indicate that I think that aside from those German photos, the others were probably placed by John, Jeanette, or Frances Nusbaum.

The photographs appear to be somewhat grouped together by the location where the photographs were taken and by photographer. The photographs seem to follow roughly this geographical order: Pennsylvania, including many from Philadelphia, but also Harrisburg and Lewistown; then two pages from Peoria, Illinois; then three pages of Santa Fe photographs; then some from New York City and other places; and then photographs from Germany (plus the ones on the reverse of the first few pages). There are also some that appear in random places within the album, but overall this is how the album is arranged.

Since I only had names on a handful of photographs and since I had no idea when the photographs were taken, I decided to retain the expert services of Ava Cohn, aka Sherlock Cohn, the Photo Genealogist. Long time readers of my blog know that I have had great success hiring Ava in the past to help me identify people in old photographs.

With the financial support of my brother and my cousins Marcia and Terry, I asked Ava to help me with this new project. I also agreed to sell the album after Ava and I were done with it to my cousin Jhette for the price I paid to the antique dealer; that way I had more money to hire Ava. Although I was sad to think that I would not be able to keep the album, I knew that Jhette, another descendant of Bernard Seligman and Frances Nusbaum, would take good care of it.

Because of the large number of photographs and my limited resources, I had to limit the scope of Ava’s work. I asked her only to date the photographs and to estimate the ages of the people in them. I was not asking her to do any identification of the people. I was hoping that with those two bits of dating information, I’d be able to deduce who the people were in the photographs—or at least narrow down the possibilities—by studying my family tree.

I also had to limit her work to about 20-25 of the almost two hundred photographs in the album. I decided to focus on those taken in Philadelphia, Santa Fe, Mainz, and Bingen because I knew that those would most likely be of my direct ancestors. As noted above, I figured that the Harrisburg, Peoria, and Lewistown photographs were of Nusbaum/Dreyfuss cousins. I had no idea who in the family (if anyone) lived in Berlin, Stuttgart, or Wiesbaden, Germany, or for that matter in St. Louis, Wheeling, or Montgomery. I knew of one branch that lived in New York, but not direct ancestors.

But because there were so many photographs taken in Philadelphia, I had to find some way to narrow down Ava’s work so that she could have the best chance of identifying the people in the photographs I chose. Based on her suggestions, we started with the photographs on the first page, figuring that those would most likely be the closest relatives if not the owners of the album; three of those were taken by the same photographer in Philadelphia. The fourth and the very first photograph in the album was taken in Harrisburg. There were two men and two women. In my wildest dreams, I was hoping that they were of John and Jeanette and Frances and Bernard.

Here are those first four photographs:

In my next two posts I will share what I learned from Ava about these four photographs and how I decided to choose the remaining 15-20 photographs for her to analyze. This will be a multipart series of posts devoted to the Nusbaum album.