Continuing with the #52ancestors prompts, this week's topic is "favorite photo." It's not that easy to pick a favorite. I have a few that I like from my childhood, but to answer the prompt, I'm going to show a photo that I hadn't seen until I visited family last March. This photograph brings up a few questions for me that I'm trying to answer.
I know exceptionally little about this photo. But it is one that depicts at least a couple of my Lamb relatives. I'm pretty sure that the gentleman at the left is my great grandfather, Eugene Lamb and in the scene with him are (left to right) my grandfather Herb Lamb, an unidentified family friend, and my granduncle Raymond Lamb at the wheel. I do have other photos of these relatives where they are well identified, so I'm able to match up their facial features. The back of the photo didn't tell me much except where and when it was taken.
Being photographed at Coney Island and posed in the way they are with the cutout set, this was most likely a staged souvenir photo area. I don't know anything yet about photo souvenir operations at the time, but as far as I can tell, what we would think of as a photobooth today was first introduced in 1925. The dark section at the left edge of the photo suggests that it may have been made with an instant pack film as a direct positive photograph. But that also comes into question on quick research as several sources point to the first instant film not being available until 1923. The post card markings on the back are not much help as I have seen quite a few family photos with instant mailing markings just like this, and print-sized stickers that look like this are still available today to make any print into a post card.
The family was living in New York at the time, appearing in the 1920 U.S. census in ward A D 2, Brooklyn.
The census enumerator didn't note the street name on this page. Two pages earlier, we find what looks like Kings Highway listed as the last street name before my family's entry.
Dorothy, who was not with the boys in the photo at Coney Island, married and moved out of the house in 1927. By 1930, the family had moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, as we find them in the U.S. census there at house number 65 on either Anderson Street or Buckingham Street.
Eugene's wife, shown in these census records as Mary C. Lamb, was born as Mary Charolotte Horne, and is my connection to family research in Georgia. Her grandfather was Orran Carstarphen Horne, who came to be known as General O.C. Horne after the Civil War, despite never actually ascending to that rank while in service. (Side note: he is the namesake of the now defunct General O.C. Horne Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy)
The census enumerator didn't note the street name on this page. Two pages earlier, we find what looks like Kings Highway listed as the last street name before my family's entry.
Dorothy, who was not with the boys in the photo at Coney Island, married and moved out of the house in 1927. By 1930, the family had moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, as we find them in the U.S. census there at house number 65 on either Anderson Street or Buckingham Street.
Eugene's wife, shown in these census records as Mary C. Lamb, was born as Mary Charolotte Horne, and is my connection to family research in Georgia. Her grandfather was Orran Carstarphen Horne, who came to be known as General O.C. Horne after the Civil War, despite never actually ascending to that rank while in service. (Side note: he is the namesake of the now defunct General O.C. Horne Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy)
But I still don't know who the person in the photo standing between Herb and Ray is. My guess is that he was a family friend. I haven't seen any photos that would match up well with his face yet.
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