Week 18 2022: Social #52Ancestors — Making Sense of it All

Social media. A curse or blessing?

The good genealogy folks on Twitter and Facebook bring a breath of fresh air to those particular hell-scapes.

My husband’s cousin manages a family Facebook page the “Baty Family Side.” Recently, a Baty cousin posted a couple of pictures (one a remarkable tintype of a young man) asking for help identifying them. As it turns out one of them was a picture I’d been looking for for years.

Shown below is the wedding photo of Edward McCormick and Mary Quinlan (many thanks to Amy for sending me a digital copy), my husband’s great grandparents. Married on August 21, 1889, in Parsons, Kansas, Ed was twenty-four, a first generation American of Irish parents. Mary was twenty-three. Her father was an Irishman while her mother was born in Fall River, Massachusetts.

You might wonder about a black wedding dress. White gowns were unusual back then, considered an “unnecessary expense.”[1] Originally, the white wedding dress did not symbolize virginity/purity, but instead communicated the wealth of the wearer or her family because they were pricier and harder to keep clean.[2] Most women simply got married in the best dress they already owned.

For Western brides, the marriage of Queen Victoria and the industrial revolution ushered in the ubiquity of the white wedding dress. “The rise of photography, and of wedding portraits in particular, also went a long way in popularizing the white-wedding-dress trend.”[3]

For Mary, living out on the prairie, it was likely implausible that she’d select impractical white. Born the year after the Civil War ended, she was the oldest of thirteen. She and Ed went on to have eight of their own.

Their wedding portrait looks to be a typical cabinet card with the photographer’s imprint on the bottom front of the card. Located on Johnston Ave. in Parsons, the photographer in this case was Louis Moberly. Louis was not your typical plains photographer, however. Born in Kentucky 1832, he plied his trade throughout the South and Midwest including Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas.[4] In 1879, while living in McKinney, Texas, Moberly received a patent for a “new and valuable Improvement in Photographic – Background Tablets,” Patent No. 216,435.[5] Well that’s kinda cool. I can’t say I understand what the patent is all about, but I did find a photo of his studio in McKinney in about 1880. See below - more than just “kind” cool.

Moberly passed away on February 27, 1914. His obituary noted that he was a photographer and member of the Masons, but doesn’t mention in photographic invention.[6]

[1] Maureen A. Taylor, Family Photo Detective (Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2013), 78.

[2] Summer Brennan, “A Natural History of the Wedding Dress,” Jstor Daily, 27 September 2017 (https://daily.jstor.org/a-natural-history-of-the-wedding-dress/ : accessed 30 June 2022).

[3] Ibid.

[4] 1900 U.S. Census, Benton County, Arkansas, population schedule, enumeration district 14, p. 52 (stamped), p. 15A (penned) dwelling 309, family 309, Louis Moberly; image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 June 2022); citing National Archives microfilm publication T623, roll 51. “Moberly, L.,” Photographer Lists, Mo to My,” Langdon’s List of 19th & early 20th Century Photographers (https://www.langdonroad.com/mo-to-my : accessed 30 June 2022).

[5] United States Patent Office, Specifications and Drawings of Patents Issued From the United States Patent Office for June 1879 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879), 492; images Google Books (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Specifications_and_Drawings_of_Patents_I/SM06AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22LOUIS+Moberly%22+McKinney+Tx&pg=PA492&printsec=frontcover : accessed 1 July 2022).

[6] “Louis Moberly is Dead,” The Parsons (Kansas) Daily Sun, 28 February 1914, p. 1, col. 6.