In front of me now are individual portraits of nine of the twelve children of Nathan and Mary McClain. They were all taken at the same time, evidently. I would have had only a guess when that was, except for some calculations on the back of one of several copies of the photo of Arthur McClain. It seems someone was trying to figure out how old Arthur was when the portrait was taken.

In the course of this, the writer recorded the year this was written (1907), the year the portrait was taken (1898), and Arthur’s age at the time this was written (22). From this, the writer worked out that Arthur was 13 years old in the portrait.

Arthur’s portrait from this set will be posted in due course, but knowing these portraits were taken in 1898 helps a lot.

These are small portraits (1½ by 2 inches) mounted on cartes-de-visite. There is no visible studio stamp or imprint on the cards. Only the one portrait of Arthur has any writing on it. I presume the portraits were taken somewhere near Paxton, Nebraska, since that is where the family was living in 1898.

The oldest of Nathan and Mary’s children represented in this set is daughter Nellie, their fourth child.

The oldest child, Alice, died shortly after birth in 1874.

Children numbers 2 and 3, Charlie and Bill, turned 23 and 21, respectively, in 1898. If their portraits were taken during the session, they are not in the photo album. They were living at home at the time of the 1900 census, so presumably were in 1898 also.

Charlie married Belinda Catherine (“Kate”) Smith January 1, 1901. So he was already married when Nathan and Mary and the family moved to Oregon. He was a barber in Nebraska until 1922, when he moved to Albany and continued barbering there.

A bit more detail about Charlie and Kate can be found here (←click or tap).

Bill never married (as far as anyone knows) and was something of an itinerant worker on construction projects. A bit more about him can be found here (←click or tap).

This brings us to Nellie, the oldest of the children with a portrait in this set.

Nellie turned 19 years old in March 1898, so was likely 19 in this portrait. She was 22 when she moved west with her parents in 1901 and probably 23 by the time they got to the Willamette Valley.

She was 26 and her groom Joseph Warren was 35 when they married in December 1905 in or near Albany. Joseph was from Pennsylvania, but I don’t have any information about where he was in the years leading up to their marriage. I assume Nellie met Joseph after the move to Oregon, but it isn’t impossible that they met in Nebraska and he followed her west.

A bit more about Nellie, her children and her famous recipe for berry pudding can be found here (←click or tap).