The Photo Detective

I stumbled upon a great website today. I really enjoy following a trail along the Internet and see where it takes me. It’s probably one of my favorite things to do as a matter of fact. So I started at the Yahoo group I am a part of for Revolutionary War. Someone linked us up to a great Flickr group that has some awesome pictures pertaining to 1775 to 1783 (I will share more from her in future posts). In this Flickr group there is a small forum, and someone there mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal back in October of 2007 about Maureen Taylor. So I did a Google search for the article, and found Maureen’s main website, The Photo Detective. From there I found the website I was looking for …

The Last Muster

Maureen started this blog to document her project of finding photographs of people that were alive during the Revolutionary War. She is looking to find the following types of photographs:

Daguerreotypes (1839 to 1860s): The first photographs, daguerreotypes have reflective surfaces; you must hold the photos at an angle to see their images. Daguerreotypes are often found in cases.

Ambrotypes (invented in 1854): Often placed in cases because of their fragility, these glass images are backed with dark material.

Tintypes or ferrotypes (invented in 1856): This third type of cased image is produced on thin sheets of iron.

Cartes de visite (CDV’s) (introduced in 1854): Inspired by 19th-century visiting cards, these small paper prints usually measured 2 x 4 inches.

And the following people from the Revolutionary War era:

Patriots, soldiers and loyalist adults: Anyone who was an adult during the American Revolution would have been at least 80 years old by the advent of photography. Several veterans appeared in Reverend Elias Hillard ‘s Last Men of the Revolution in the 1860s, but thousands of men applied for pensions after the War.

Children: Anyone who was a child during the American Revolution would have been in his late 50s or older when they had their picture taken beginning in the 1840s.

Wives and widows: The last surviving widow of a Revolutionary soldier died in 1906! Esther Sumner married Noah Damon when she was 21 and he was 75. Finding pictures of wives and widows means looking at pictures taken anywhere from 1840 to the early 1900s.

She will be publishing a book with all the pictures she has found. She has been doing this for some time now, but it looks like she may be close to publishing the book. In January she posted that she has finished the draft, so hopefully we will see this on the shelves soon! I am very interested to see all her research. If you want to see more on her project, be sure to check out her blog and also take a look at this page that explains her project a little more:

Finding the Revolutionary War Generation

See what you can find sometimes when you are just hanging out on the World Wide Web?

Believe me yours faithfully,
Rachel