Before I turn to the photographs that I analyzed on my own (with a few tips from Ava along the way), I want to return to my great-great-grandmother Frances Nusbaum Seligman and my attempts to find her in the album–the album that once belonged to her and has her name on it. Some of this is a review of this post, but with some additional thoughts and images added.

There were several photos in the album that might be Frances based on her birthdate and the date Ava concluded that a photograph might have been taken. For example, on the very first page there is this photograph, which Ava dated as taken in about 1863 when Frances would have been 18; Ava thought the young woman was about 20-22 years old, so just a bit older than Frances would have been. The fact that it appears on the very first page of the album added weight to the possibility that it is Frances.

On the seventh page of the album is this photograph, which Ava also dated as taken in about 1863. Ava thought this woman could be about 25, so slightly older than the one on the first page, but still possibly Frances although Ava ultimately didn’t think so.

Philadelphia c 1863 born abt 1838 maybe Eliza Wiler

Then there is the photograph much later in the album that has an inscription on the back that says it is “Miss Nusbaum” and that it is Joan’s great-grandmother. Ava dated this photograph also in the 1863 time period and thought the woman was a teenager between fifteen and eighteen, placing her birth year very close to Frances’ birth year of 1845. But because this was so late in the album, Ava was skeptical about the inscription.

I added another photograph to this mix just recently. This one was taken in about 1870, and Ava thought the woman in this photograph was about twenty years old, so born in about 1850.

Philadelphia 1869 born about 1848

There was also the fuzzy still from a video of a portrait supposedly of Frances Nusbaum Seligman from Arthur Seligman’s house in Santa Fe.

Finally, there is one image I haven’t shared before and that Ava had not previously evaluated. It is not a CDV and it was not inserted into one of the openings in the album, but was just loose inside the album. It is an image of a portrait that sadly was not labeled.

I wondered whether this was a portrait of Frances, but Ava said that this was painted in the late 1840s, early 1850s so could not be Frances. But it possibly could be Frances’ mother, Jeanette Dreyfuss Nusbaum, my three-times great-grandmother.

I then put together a collage of all six faces to compare them better:

One thing I noticed right away was that five of the women had similar lips—all but the one labeled D. Her lips were more heart-shaped. The other five had similar mouths. E seemed to have eyes that tilted down whereas all the others had eyes that went straight across. A and B are the portraits, A perhaps of Jeanette, B supposedly Frances. The more I looked at the two remaining images—C and F—the more alike they looked to me.

I ran them through two online face comparison websites, and both said that C and F were the same person. None of the others, however, matched C, F, or any of the others as the same person or even close. I asked Ava if she thought C and F were the same person, and her AI programs also found a match.

But Ava had reasons to doubt whether C and F were the same person. She pointed out that C, taken in 1863 or so, looks older than F, taken in 1870 or so. How could C have gotten younger looking seven years later?

Also, F is in a photograph with a young man who one might assume was her husband. She is wearing a wedding ring, and Frances was married in 1865. But the man in the photograph with F is not Frances Nusbaum’s husband, Bernard. Maybe it’s one of her brothers. But from the photograph one would think the man and woman are a couple.

So…bottom line? I still cannot be sure whether any of these women were Frances.

I have sent scans of the six photographs that were taken in Santa Fe to the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society and to the New Mexico History Museum, both in Santa Fe, hoping that perhaps they have somewhere a photograph of Frances. So far I have not heard back that they do. But I will keep hoping that I can someday figure out which woman in the album is my great-great-grandmother Frances Nusbaum Seligman.