Sentimental Sunday: Priceless Lovelace Photos

Ruby and Amy Hardy
daughters of William L. and Alice S. (Lovelace) Hardy

Elsewhere I have chronicled the story of how I started my lifelong journey into researching family history after the death of my grandmother Amy in 1989. At the funeral, I watched my great-aunt Ruby weep for her sister and realized that she and my grandmother were both once little girls. Ruby (born in 1898) and Amy (born in 1902) were daughters of William Lewis Hardy and his wife Alice Samantha Lovelace. Alice died in 1903 just before Amy's first birthday. I have written a little about this branch of the family (see this post here for further information about Amy) but realize I do not have much documented here on this blog. With some time on my hands during this holiday season, I write this post as an attempt to remedy that and help ensure that some of the visual memories I have of these ancestors are not lost. I love that this medium is a great vehicle for doing so.

The above photograph of Ruby and Amy was taken sometime in the early 1900s and is one of the most darling photos. If there was anything that would spark a young girl's imagination about the past, this is it, like my very own Little House on the Prairie connection. I imagine that Amy's calico dress might have been red like the one I wore in the fourth grade:

My fourth grade class photo. I am the second person from the
left seated in the second row from the bottom wearing my red calico dress.

This is the only photograph I have of me wearing this dress. I begged my other grandmother to make it for me (along with a bonnet) as I was madly in love with the Little House on the Prairie book series and wanted a dress just like the one Laura Ingalls would have worn. How I wish I still had that dress!

I digress too easily; let me get back to old photographs. Alice Samantha Lovelace, my great-grandmother, was the daughter of Isaac Newton Lovelace and his wife Martha "Matt" Rebecca Stiller. Below is a copy of a photograph showing Isaac and Matt in their older years. A xerox copy of this photograph was sent to me by a distant cousin, Betty Krist, a granddaughter of J.W. Stiller, Matt Stiller Lovelace's brother. Betty had pursued genealogy for years when I made contact with her via U.S. mail in the early 1990s. She had submitted an entry on her Lovelace - Stiller family to The Heritage of Iredell County (North Carolina) book published in 1980. I have recently unearthed this photo from my old Lovelace binder and scanned it to ensure I now have a digital copy. (I have since determined that Betty Krist passed away about two years ago.)

Isaac Newton Lovelace and Martha "Matt" Rebecca Stiller (older couple seated in darker clothing)
and family members (including Matt's brother J.W. Stiller, man standing with beard)

You can imagine my joy in receiving a copy of this photo showing these direct ancestors of mine. We do not always have the privilege of being able to see what our ancestors looked like. It turns out, though, that I likely had already in my possession an earlier photograph of this couple, I just did not know it as it was never identified. The two photographs below were among the old photographs my grandfather had, but they were so old that even he could not identify them.

Probably Isaac N. Lovelace
& wife Martha R. Stiller

Probably Ellen and Elvira Lovelace,
sisters of Isaac N. Lovelace

This is what I know about these photographs: Both are paper cdv photographs and their style and thickness date them to between 1861-1868. The back of the first photograph is blank but the second photograph is stamped "“E.L. Foulks photographer, Main St, Hopkinsville, KY.” Notes from Christian Co, Ky USGenweb on area photographers indicate that Foulks was in business from about 1858 to before 1880 as he pursued other ventures.
 
Isaac and Matt were married in July of 1867 so the first one could have been a wedding photograph. If you study this one and the couple shown in the photograph above who are positively identified as Isaac and Matt, you can see that it is entirely probable.

Betty writes in her entry on the Lovelace - Stiller family that Ellen and Elvira, unmarried sisters of Isaac and Lewis Lovelace, moved from Iredell County, North Carolina and joined the brothers in Christian County, Kentucky. Both Ellen (the older of the two) and Elvira were seamstresses and living in between the households of Isaac Lovelace and his son Dewitt Lovelace in the Bainbridge District of Christian County, Kentucky during the 1900 U.S. census.

One other photograph that I will include here could likely also be identified as someone in the Lovelace family but without further evidence, I cannot say for sure. As you can see, it does bear a resemblance to a known photograph of Isaac's nephew, William B. Lovelace, as shown in another identified xerox copy of a photograph sent to me by Betty Krist as well. William was a son of Lewis Randolph Lovelace, whose daughter Rachel married J.W. Stiller and became Betty's grandparents.

The photograph on the left is a paper cdv with a style and thickness that dates it to 1871-1874. There are no identifying marks on the back. The photograph on the right is a xerox copy of a photograph identified by Betty Krist as William B. Lovelace (1854-1939), son of Lewis Randolph Lovelace.









And to end this post, I include the original scanned copy of the xeroxed photo that Betty Krist sent me that shows the identification of everyone by her. Most of the children are Isaac and Matt's grandchildren through their son Dewitt. Dewitt is not shown, but his wife Dora is standing to the left of J.W. Stiller. Rachel Lovelace Stiller, Isaac's niece and wife of J.W. Stiller, is seated next to Isaac on the left.