Recovering Women's Identities in the Carte De Visite Collection at Chicago History Museum

     I have just wrapped the second week of my practicum at Chicago History Museum.  Touring the facilities and seeing the vastness of their archives was incredible.  The sensation of feeling honored and privileged to see behind the scenes at the museum has not yet worn off!  The photo archive that I am working in is substantial.  Vertical files and archival boxes are full of every photographic process.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I am working with the carte de visite collection.  It is a small portion of the photographic holdings, but even it is quite extensive.  So far, I have only worked my way through about half of the first filing cabinet drawer (and I am only working with the unnamed women in the collection)!  Already I am wondering if I will get all the way through the items needing to be addressed in this collection by the end of my practicum.  Regardless, at least I am making a dent in it!

      I have begun to develop a workflow for recovering the names of the women in the carte de visite collection. The women are described in the catalog by their husbands' names such as "Bower, Samuel, -- Mrs." I start with the spreadsheet and look up the item by the bib # in the catalog.  I usually check the record to see if there is any helpful information in the notes or dates.  Next, I search Library of Congress Name Authorities to see if the woman or her husband are listed.  After that, I check findagrave.com and Google.  Sometimes a simple Google search will help provide more info on who the woman or her husband were, such as their names and birth and death dates.  Other times, I am still at a loss so I look at the Heritage Quest genealogy site through the Chicago Public Library.  If I still am having a hard time or I'm looking for additional information, I search the Chicago Tribune database.  And then sometimes I find a small detail there and have to backtrack to findagrave.com or Google, etc.  Often I will find a photo of someone that might be the woman I am looking for, and I will go pull the photo from the archive and compare the carte de visite image to the images I have found online.

    This past Tuesday, I was able to recover many women's names.  That was really a thrill! Other times, it is nearly impossible to figure out who the woman is.  For example, I had a carte de visite with the name "Brown, -- Mrs.".  There was no other identifying information on the physical item or in the record.  No date, and no note about the woman's first name or her husband's first name.  I know the photo is likely from the 1860s-1870s, but that is often not specific enough because I still don't know the person's birth or death year.  There were many other images of men with the last name Brown in the carte de visite collection, so I researched them to see if I could get info on their wives.  But I found myself going around in circles with no leads.  So, sometimes you have to just move on to the next name.  It's sad, some of these women's identities are simply lost in time.

    So that is what I am working on for now.  It may seem tedious, but I really get lost in the research.  Sometimes I have to force myself to stop and take a lunch break!  After doing the research phase, I will be learning about how to change the information in the catalog record.  For many (really most) of these women, we will create local name authority files for them.  

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