Ellett Family Weirdness!

Originally, all I knew of this family photo was that it was my Great Great Grandparents' family. I only knew that my great grandmother Kerney was one of the children.

I have been trying to I.D. the rest of the people in this photograph. The parents were easy enough. The children have been difficult.

Initially, I thought that the last of their children, Leslie C. Ellett, was born around 1902, and I think that would date this photo sometime around 1898 or 1899 since there are only 8 children in it. The children of Charles Henry and Mattie Hammond (Sanford) Ellett are listed in the 1900 and 1910 census records:

 So, I originally thought the list went like so:

TOP L-R: Luther S Ellett b 1883, Marvin S Ellett b 1889, Stella W Ellett b 1893, Kerney Leo Ellett b 1886

Bottom L-R: Charles Henry Ellet b 1859, holding Maggie G Ellett b 1896, Henry W Ellett b 1890, Otis M Ellett b 1894, Mattie Hammond (Sanford) Ellett b 1859 holding Vera V Ellett b 1898

I was sure that Kerney was the girl in the top right. Later photos of her show that she still parts her hair in a similar fashion. The other girl doesn't appear to have a hairline that would allow for that. The girl in the top right also seems to share the pouty expression that Kerney seemed to always have later.

Kerney is on the left

Kerney is on the left

Kerney is labeled "me" on bottom right

Kerney is the older woman, rear center

The problem I have run across is that Stella is actually Stell, and a boy. I originally overlooked that Stella was listed as a son in both censuses. The weird thing is that Marvin appears to be a gender bender. In 1900, Marvin is a girl and in 1910, Marvin is a boy. I have been unable to locate any other records regarding Marvin. It just seems very odd that anyone would name their daughter Marvin! I wondered if the census guys wrote the name down wrong, but it was done by two different people and they both wrote down Marvin.

So, now I am starting to think that the list actually goes:

Top L-R: Henry, Luther, Marvin, Kerney

Bottom L-R: Maggie, Charles, Stell, Otis, Mattie, Vera

It is so weird to me... Marvin is a girl's name?

More photo restoration

I've been trying my hand at more photo restoration. I posted some of the work I did on ancestry.com's facebook page, and then someone asked if I could restore a photo for them. I'm not sure I'm the best at it, but here is a before/after shot:

It took about an hour and a half altogether. I am reasonably pleased with the result, although I couldn't help but feel there was something wrong with the eyes. So, I tried a second time:

The face is much more true to the original in this one, I think.

It's a photo restoration EXTRAVAGANZA

I've been spending some time fixing the color on some old photos and am very pleased with the results so far. Here are a few before/after examples:

More Photo Restoration

It has been quite a while since I last wrote. On September 24, I broke my back when I fell from a ladder while running some ethernet cable at work. I am doing much better now, but apparently will not be able to return to work for another 6 weeks.

I recently went through my Grandma Barrett's Plastic tub full of Family Photos and other things. Among the things I found was the following image of my Great Great Grandfather, William Sergeant Dixon, and his wife, Emma Duncan (Thomas) Dixon:

As you can see, the image is extremely faded, to the point where you can just barely even make out the faces. Fortunately, computers are pretty good at fixing things like this. I loaded this image up in the gimp (a free program similar to photoshop) and turned the brightness down and the contrast up. This resulted in the following image:

It is still pretty difficult to make out some of the features on William Sergeant Dixon's face and shirt. The rest of the image shows a marked improvement, however. I then used the bezier selection tool to select just WSD's face and shirt, so I could darken it up without darkening the rest of the image. There was still the problem of his face having uneven lighting, so I then had to select a portion of his face and lighten it up. This resulted in an ugly line going across his face, so I then used the heal tool, which comes in handy for removing lines and creases from old photos. The resulting image is this:

 

As far as I can tell, that looks much better. His face is maybe a little dark, but you can actually see it, which is much better than what I started out with. There was another photo I found of my Great Great Great Grandfather, John Turk Beecher and his wife, Maria H. Sprague. This photo was in very bad shape and I didn't have much hope for it at all:

It is on some kind of strange blue print which has faded substantially over the past 100+ years. My first attempt at restoring this image was not really what I was going for:

 

 

So, I tried again. This time, yielding different results:

 

I still wasn't satisfied with the results. So, I tried again, this time converting to grayscale:

That's about as good as this image is going to get, I'm afraid. I'm still pretty amateur at this, but I think I am getting reasonably good results from my limited image editing skills.