I have before me a fascinating photo album that was given to Addie Hammel (our Grandma McClain) about 1907. Here is what it looks like on the spine side:

And here is what it looks like from the other side, showing the clasp to close the album:

Inside, the pages are designed with pockets to accept portrait photos on backing board. (The photo on the page shown below is not significant. This is just to show how photos sat in these pockets on the pages.) Some pages have one pocket on each side, some pages have four smaller pockets on each side. Normally there would be a strip of paper holding the bottom of this portrait in place (and forming a slit at the bottom into which the photo on backing board is inserted), but on this page that has ripped and is missing.

This dedication is written on the flyleaf of the album:

This is where the mystery begins. Neither I nor any of my siblings is aware of Grandma ever having been any sort of teacher. Kathryn suggested that this might be a reference to Grandma teaching piano. I was not aware myself that Grandma even played piano, let alone taught it, but that is a possibility.

But the mystery deepens. The first portrait in the photo album is this one:

(You have to love Victorian Era portraits.)

This photo was taken in Albany, as evidenced by the studio imprint on the backing board:

This notation is on the back of the backing board:

(This is written in pencil on a very dark background, so the above is not what it looks like in real life. I had to really tweak the image to bring out the writing.)

Presumably this “Annie Ackerman” is the same person as the “Anna Akerman” who gave Grandma the photo album. This Anna/Annie was 15 years old in this photo, but when was the photo taken? One possibility is that the date (“June 6, ’05”) is the date the photo was taken or the date it was given to Grandma. But I’m going to assume the date is when Annie immigrated from Russia. Running with that assumption, we can narrow down the year the photo was taken to a pretty small window.

If Annie came from Russia in June 1905, a photo taken in Albany had to be after that, of course. Grandma and Grandpa were married in  January  June 1908. I assume the photo and the album were given to Grandma together, or pretty close to it. And since the dedication of the album is addressed to “Addie Hammel” we know it was before Grandma was married. So taking all this together, the photo of Annie almost certainly was taken in 1906 or 1907 (if it wasn’t 1905).

I have tried to find Annie Ackerman in the 1910 U.S. Census, to no avail. There were very few people named Ackerman (or Akerman) from Russia anywhere in the Pacific Northwest in 1910, and none in Albany as far as I can tell. But even across the whole country, none exactly matches what we know about the Annie Ackerman in this photo, even if we ignore that she was from Russia.

So it’s a mystery. What did Grandma teach Annie Ackerman? If (as it seems) Annie left Albany before the 1910 census was taken, where did she go? Unfortunately this story doesn’t have a nice, neat conclusion like the one about Donna Watrous. And more than likely it never will.

There are many other portraits in Grandma’s album that have no information at all on them, so the identities of those people are lost to time even more than Annie Ackerman. I don’t see any point in posting those photos. They are interesting curiosities (more Victorian portraits), but they don’t really advance the purpose of this blog, which is family history.

But there are some portraits and other photos in the album that do relate to family history, and I will post those in the coming days.

The purpose of this post was to introduce the photo album itself, and the mysteries surrounding it. I don’t think posts about other photos from the album will be this long or this detailed. Thanks for reading.