My task was to rehouse the cased image collection, placing the daguerreotypes , tintypes and ambrotypes in number envelopes so they weren’t the jumbled mess they were. I would occasionally open the decorated boxes to see these people from the past and refer to the register to learn their name.
One of the images I had come across was breathtakingly beautiful. The photographer was well ahead of his time with pose, focus and sculpting with light. The woman in the picture practically glowed from the inside out. Unfortunately, I noticed that there wasn’t an ID number linked with it, meaning that this was not an image that had been digitized. However, looking at the list of names, the name of a relation stood out to me, because it was so unique; Sophronia. Unlike her relative, Sophronia’s image had been made digital and available online.
Sophronia Newcomb Larkin
According to Noyes family tree on Rootsweb, Sophronia Newcomb was born on September 26, 1820 in Darien, Genese Co., NY and married Benjamin Franklin Larkin on February 18, 1841 in Attica, Wyoming Co., NY. At some point within the next 4 years, they would move to Madison, WI and have their only child there, Amanda J. Larkin on July 4, 1845. Sophronia died on March 14, 1891.
Daguerreotypes were some of a family’s most treasured possessions in the later half of he 19th century. Unfortunately many families don’t keep records of who is in the pictures and rely on memory for who was related to who and when the image was taken. Looking at the information on the Rootsweb page makes me wonder if someday I will be <name><birthdate><birth city><death date><death city> and maybe even <spouse name><marriage date><children> if I should be so lucky to have those someday. I’m not going to say that thinking of myself as a series of dates and place “puts things into perspective” but it definitely makes me look at things from a different perspective.
For example, migration patterns and spouses could be easily tracked and looking even further into the Noyes tree on Rootsweb, you can see that Sophronia and Benjamin met in New York. With people meeting and dating over the internet via site like Match.com and eHarmony, tracking relations like that is nearly impossible. How would we track that kind of movement? Or tell the story of how you and your spouse met? Sometimes it results in a short and not very interesting tale. “We met online through a dating site.” And while the tale of How We Met is not really that important, it says a lot about the changing ways of our world today and how much the creation of the internet has altered our society completely.
And I have gone off on an esoteric tangent. When beginning the entry the other point I wanted to say is that Sophronia is a beautiful name and you don’t see names like that now. I wonder how many “Sophronia”’s are in the United States today.
