The Woman in the Portrait...
...Or Grandma GoGo and the Case of Mistaken Identity
As always, rather liberally unedited.
THERE ARE TIMES in family history when everything you believed to be true is turned on its head in an instant. A previously unknown vital record will drop like manna from heaven to reveal the truth behind someone's long-sought-after identity. A misremembered headstone is found, or a lost will or land record shows up out of nowhere. It happens. Then there's the day that arrives when the woman in the portrait may not be who you thought she was.
Say what?
Yeah, that happened to me today. What's worse is I have the darn portrait. My information doesn't appear to be second-hand. I didn't copy and paste the picture off the Great Interweb. I didn't take the information about who the picture was of from some old hand-me-down rumor or a Cousin Sam says "maybe it's so and so" memo. However, is who she was—or what I thought to be true about the woman—not so?
Is she not my great-grandmother??
This all started about mid-last week when, for some crazy-ass reason, I decided to revisit the family of my great-grandmother, Mary Kraus Ogle, otherwise known of in family circles as, "Grandma GoGo." Beats me as to why I went here. Maybe it's because she is one of the first family lines I researched (now about forty years ago) or because I have always felt comfortable in remembering her. I think the truth is that since it had been decades since I'd really looked at her ancestry, I sort of wondered what it was that I might have forgotten. Gogo is, after all, my very original Mayflower line, and for me, that means something. (Not to mention her being an incredible character in my family's more immediate past.)
So I dug in and looked at her uncles and cousins. I re-read about her parents' divorce and her father's terrible accident (suicide?) with two oncoming trains. I looked at probate records and land sales, and newspaper articles. In the midst of all this, though, I decided to look at Mary's sisters, the aunts Gertrude, Anna, and Ethel. I never knew them very well. I met Gertrude once when I was a little boy, and my recollection of her is a scene of an old woman in a house on a hill in central Kansas. She seemed terribly old to me then, as no doubt she was. I knew Anna; Anna was a sweet woman, a gentle soul who, if there is a heaven, Aunt Anna is surely there. I corresponded with her for a few years after the death of my great-grandmother. I still have a few of her finely penned letters around here somewhere. I hope I haven't lost those letters to that malevolent crusader known as time.
I did not know Mary's youngest sister, Ethel. She passed when I was a very little boy, though I did meet her daughters once, all three of them named after her sisters; they were: Gertrude Faith, Mary Louise, and Jo Ann. Ethel, whose life was so hard after her husband ran out on her, pregnant with two children, and was never heard from again—at least not until his daughters tracked him down sixty years later, buried under an assumed name in Sacramento.
Yeah, poor Ethel. She didn't have it so great.
It was about then, that is after looking at all these lives, that I pulled out my copy of John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants. It is a beautiful, hard-bound genealogy of my great-grandmother's family put together by one of Ethel's daughters, Jo Ann. In it I found a picture of the girls gathered around their mother, Electa (Newcomb) Kraus. Now I have looked at this book and indeed this picture for many years. However, this time, though, I believe I actually saw it for the first time. The caption below the picture reads:
"Electa Newcomb Kraus and her four daughters. From lower left clockwise: Anna, Mary, Gertude, and Ethel, date unknown."
Clockwise? Did you say lower left clockwise?
How have I not seen this before? (Gee, I don't know Jeff, you've only had the book for twenty-five years or so and the portrait for over thirty...)
If that's true, then the woman in the photograph portrait at the top of this blog post above, that the woman I believe to be my great-grandmother Mary Kraus Ogle, isn't. According to this statement in John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants, this means that the young woman standing on the left side as you look at the picture is not my great-grandmother Mary. I can easily identify the pictures of the other girls, those of Anna and Ethel, out of the mix, but the two girls standing at the back are very similar in appearance.
So, which one is which?
Which one is Grandma GoGo?
Is the portrait that has followed my family around for the last one hundred years actually a picture of her sister, Gertrude?
Why has my genealogical record and reality been turned on its head all in one morning's time?
I have always been told (or was under the assumption) that the woman in the portrait was Mary. On the back of the portrait are even notes, written in pencil describing her hair, dress, complexion, and "D.S. Ogle." Now, D.S. Ogle was my great-grandfather and (obviously) Mary's husband. So if it isn't a picture of Mary, why would it have her husband's name written on the back of it?
(Gotta say too that the notes on the back of the picture are vaguely creepy. Nah, they're really creepy.)
But I recognize my grandmother's handwriting too... identifying the woman as her mother.
So...
Why would I have instead inherited a portrait-style photograph of fricking Aunt Gertrude? (No offense to Gertie.)
The image above, "going back in time," does little to help answer the question.
It is curious.
The information contained in John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants was prepared by Ethel's daughter. It seems more credible that she, a second-generation descendant who prepared the genealogy, would have done a thorough job in documenting who was who in the picture. Indeed, she would have had a better firsthand knowledge of just who her mother's sisters were than I would.
It's also evident that the young woman in the singular portrait is certainly the same young woman who is standing far right as you look at the group photo taken with their mother, Electa. Still, is it not possible that the author of the book misremembered the order or the order in which the girls were standing around their mother?
That's a tough call.
The only thing I can do is look at GoGo's (Mary's) and Gertrude's photographs as older women. Will this reveal any clues as to the identity of the woman in the portrait?
Possible Gertrudes above? Left or right?
Gogo, where are you? Left or right?
Surely, my grandmother's knew her own mother, but then again, Grandma was adopted. So did she? Did Grandma just assume?
The interesting thing here is that there really is a correct answer. Since we can identify sisters Anna and Ethel, this is just a matter of "cutting the correct jib," so to speak.
I guess for now, I am going to go with what I was told and take what is written on the back of the old portrait-style photograph as true. I may be wrong in doing so, but unraveling the myth that was Mary Ogle or her sister Gertrude Day out of all of this may prove simply impossible. It seems improbable that Mary would have maintained such a glamor shot of her sister Gertrude for nearly seventy years, or that my grandmother Katheryn wouldn't have known that it was her mother in the portrait that she inherited from her. (My grandmother had an amazing acumen for all things family) And while it's not nice to bag on Aunt Ethel's daughters' identification of Mary or Gertrude in the pictures, sadly, as with most family histories, genealogies, or portraits... There comes a time when...
There's no one left to say.
RIP.
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