One in a series of essays inspired by the intersection of family photographs and memory.
THEY STARE OUT at me and at the rest of the 21st century, sepia emissaries from another era, proof of the adage that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” I never met a single one of them. Yet they are, incontrovertibly, my people.
I never tire of this photo. It has entranced me since I was a little boy. It connects me to what was. Mounted on a thick cardboard backing, it shows members of the Anthony family of Ohio outside their farmhouse in Rockport, Cuyahoga County, on Thursday, Oct. 21, 1897.
Representatives of three generations congregated on those farmhouse steps just west of Cleveland, most of them unsmiling — the children of my great-great grandparents Edward Mason Anthony (1826–1891) and Sophronia Lurania Tyler (1834–1916), with a couple sisters-in-law and a couple of grandchildren in the mix. The widowed matriarch, Sophronia, at age 63 a formidable center of familial gravity, sits in the middle, presiding. I can’t imagine messing with her.
My grandfather, Edward Mason Anthony Sr. (1894–1954), is the little blond toddler at the lower left who is holding his father’s hand, and who moved just enough to blur his face for posterity. His brother, John Bradley Anthony, would be born the following April; their mother, Ada M. (Bradley) Anthony, pictured in a black dress with her hands interlaced and a wisp of dark hair coming down her forehead, was pregnant with him already in this photo.
I have long wished I knew some of them; even my late father knew only a few. But they have always loomed large in my life — just as the photo has always hung somewhere on my wall, a portal to a world that is just out of reach.
AT SOME POINT after he grew up, my grandfather listed the people in this photo on the back of it. Those names, written in his looping cursive, turned the photograph into something even more than an epic image; it made the image into a Rosetta Stone for the Anthony side of my family. People in so many other photos we have in our family archives are identifiable only because of the annotations on this one.
Yet there is one person in the photo who resists being known, whose identity I’ve never been able to pin down.
A compact, elderly woman stands in the back row, giving a sideways glance to the camera as if she was skeptical of its purpose. She is clad in a dress that sports an almost Elizabethan collar. My grandfather identified her as simply “Melissa” — something of an uncommon name back then — but did not write down any surname, presumably because he did not know.
I’ve wondered for decades who this Melissa might have been, and only more so since I married one. (Which why I know that the name means “honeybee” in ancient Greek.)
Was she a maid — a beloved housekeeper invited to pose with the family? A neighbor who had been asked over for lunch? Each seems unlikely — the housekeeper theory because of how the formality of her clothing matched the others, and the neighbor theory because the image is so obviously a full-on family portrait, designed to capture a significant gathering.
It remained a mystery — until, perhaps, one evening a couple years ago.
Prowling around online on Ancestry.com, I followed a Find-a-Grave link to the grave of my great-great grandparents, Edward Mason and Sophronia (Tyler) Anthony, in Coe Ridge Cemetery on Lorain Road outside Cleveland, which I have visited many times. I then clicked on her parents, the Connecticut-born David Miles Tyler and Polly (Farrell) Tyler. Though I knew their names and dates, I had never seen photos of their graves, a bit farther west in Ohio. Suddenly, here they were.
Intriguingly, it listed among their children not only Sophronia, but a “Melissa Eunice Tyler Redington” (1822–1905), who married the wonderfully named Ransom Nathaniel Redington. When I clicked on her link, it showed not only a grave but a photo that looked as if it was taken in the 1860s.
You can see her above: a dramatic-looking woman, jaw square, beautiful and clearly formidable, captured staring intensely in an early Tintype-era photo that, in the right horror movie, could seem downright haunting. I like her already, and even more so after learning that she named one of her children Horace Greeley Redington after the founding editor of the New York Tribune and the popularizer of the phrase, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”
Melissa Redington, it turns out, died in 1905 in Amherst, Ohio, over in neighboring Lorain County, where her sister had been born eight decades before.
LET’S TAKE STOCK, then, of what we have:
a unidentified woman named Melissa who appears in a family portrait in 1897, of which the centerpiece is the daunting Sophronia Tyler Anthony.
the fact that Sophronia’s older sister was named Melissa, which was an uncommon name at the time. She’d be an aunt to seven of the people in the picture, including my great-grandfather.
the fact that the dates of her life match the appearance of the woman in the photo’s age.
the conclusion that Melissa Redington could have quite plausibly been there for the family get-together because she lived just a few miles west. (Strengthening the notion that it was indeed something of a momentous get-together, two elderly Anthony aunts, Martha Anthony Peck and Sarah Anthony Lord, are in the photo at the right; the latter was, to the best of my knowledge, living in Colorado at the time.)
the possibility that there exists a resemblance between the Melissa Redington in the early photo and the “Melissa” in the family portrait, though about half a century separates the two images.
Perhaps we can examine that final point a bit more closely.
It’s hard to avoid confirmation bias when you’re looking for a resemblance between people in old photos. Yes, there are differences; the noses, for one, seem distinct. But the hair part, the tilt of the mouth, the prominent cheekbones, the jawline and the close proximity of the eyebrows to the eyes all lead me to believe that this is indeed the same person — that the Melissa in question in the 1897 family portrait is, in fact, Sophronia’s sister, and that she came from her home a few miles away to attend a family reunion that involved her sister’s two sisters-in-law visiting from faraway Colorado. (Random data point: My Melissa agrees.)
I suspect that my grandfather, in writing down the names, had a dim memory of this woman named Melissa — she would have been his great-aunt — but did not know any more than her first name. After all, his branch of the family had, years before, moved 10 miles east into the city of Cleveland so his father, Hubert Mason Anthony (droopy mustache and glower, at left in the photo at the top), could run a grocery store and eventually become a streetcar conductor.
So while my grandfather was of course aware of his Anthony ancestors, he may not have been quite as aware of more distant kin of a different surname who lived even further west and into Lorain County. Twenty-five miles was certainly a greater distance in those days.
Here, then, are the photos placed side by side, with about four decades between them.
The visual evidence, I concede, is not incontrovertible. But alongside all the other stuff, it starts to feel persuasive to me. It is, perhaps, yet another filament of connection in the American continuum, brought out because of a missing last name on the back of a family photo taken long ago that captured a moment — just one single moment on one October day, a looking glass into the lives of people now long gone. My people.
I never tire of your reflections and connections, your stitching of observations and research into strong tapestries. You sort thoughts to frame the significance of what may seem ordinary, but is relatable because it's universal.
These gems sparkle: "yet another filament of connection in the American continuum" and "a portal to a world that is just out of reach." And though it took just a few keystrokes to learn that this epic image was snapped on a Thursday, your journalistic reflex adds a nice bit of precision.
Ron Fournier, a Detroit acquaintance, is right about your storytelling chops, Ted. Another first-rate essay.