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| Confirmation photo: This photograph of the writer's grandfather and his sister helped convince German relatives that she and
her sister were truly family. Courtesy of Phyllis Kuehn |
A family reunited by an old photograph
The stilted photo, more than 100 years old, was the key to convincing the German branch of the family that the Americans were genuine.
from the November 7, 2007 edition
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The carte de visite album that survived and was handed down through our family includes a built-in music box, providing dual-media parlor entertainment, perhaps presaging the living room television set. The studio props used in the pictures are fascinating glimpses into the tastes of that era: balustrades, heavy curtains, sumptuous carpets, potted palm trees, fine furniture, and columns, even simulated outdoor scenes with little bridges and painted landscape backdrops.
The carte de visite process and popularity had moved to the US by 1860, and many Civil War soldiers left behind cartes de visite for their loved ones and carried similar pictures with them to war.
Around 1862 the larger so-called cabinet cards (4-1/2-by-6-1/2-inch cardboard) appeared and also became popular. We have several of those in our family collection, too, all frustratingly unidentified.
The popularity of cartes de visite diminished after 1900, however, when Kodak began selling the hugely popular cardboard Brownie box camera for $1.
Remarkably, these delicate prints have survived for generations. And one of ours, showing our grandfather Joseph and his sister Martha in a serious, awkward sibling pose, turned out to be literally a carte de visite for my sister and me.
Years of searching for descendents of the sister left in Berlin when our grand-father emigrated finally paid off when a particular letter, one of many we had written hopefully and painstakingly in German to presumed relatives, reached our second cousin in Berlin.
She had initially ignored our letters, suspicious of who was writing to her and asking questions about the past, until we photocopied the carte de visite of Joseph and Martha, along with other pictures, and mailed them.
It turned out that the cousin had the same carte de visite, passed down from her grandmother Martha. The occasion for the picture was their confirmations, she explained to us in her first reply.
When she saw our copy of the same picture she had, she was finally convinced that we were really family.
By the second letter, she had invited us to visit Berlin and stay in her house. We were no longer strangers, but rather family to be welcomed back more than a hundred years after parting.
We eventually did visit and that occasion, documented this time with digital photos, bridged two generations of separation and showed that in some cases, at least, cartes de visite literally are calling cards.
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