Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Photographs as a Source for Family History

Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I. Nybakken

The entire picture provides a starting point. The original photograph contained the image of a barn grafted onto the bottom. Clearly, this was a farm family. The style of the clothing and house are of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century; the automobile suggests the later period.

Why are they posing this way—lined up in their good clothes in front of a substantial house, with a parked car next to it, and (in the original picture) a large barn below? Was this intended to show the world, their descendants, and probably their families back home that they were thriving? According to northern Europeans, if the barn was bigger than the house, the farmer was succeeding. The house itself is large and very well maintained. And cars were certainly a luxury item in this period. Yes, this must have been a well-to-do family.

What made them so prosperous? One reason might be the number of sons. This household had no need to hire outside workers, so money stayed within the family. The image of the barn suggests that livestock was raised, as well as row crops, making the household relatively self-sufficient. The mother is significantly taller than the father (even when he has his hat on). Strength was more important than fragility for a farm wife, whose tasks required physical stamina. She and her little daughter stand together, suggesting that they are a labor unit. The boys are in a line, graduating in size, although none is yet a man like their father, as indicated by their knickers.

Details that the photograph might corroborate, and questions that it raises but does not answer, require additional sources. Census records for the area where the photographer worked reveal the existence of a family with five boys and a baby girl in 1910 and five boys and no girl in 1920. No other local family fits this demographic pattern. What might have happened to the little girl? County records of births, marriages, and deaths are not available because of a fire in the courthouse in the mid 1930s.

The census records also provide a name that, in Norwegian, translates into “new hill.” When U.S. immigration authorities required the family to have a last name, this probably was selected because it described the land they had left behind. The will of an “Ole” with that last name, probated in l936, names the five sons in order of age (Arthur, Otto, Oscar, Ernest, and Clarence), but not the wife. She must have died before the fire consumed the courthouse records. The description of real and personal property substantiates the wealth of the family. A large amount of stock in the Great Northern Railroad (almost worthless when the will was probated in 1936) also indicates the economic priorities and strategies of the family. Isolated farmers wanted both to get their produce to market and to invest in something as seemingly solvent as the Great Northern. By providing their names, the will allows us to locate the children, to see if they might be able to fill in the details and answer the questions that the photograph only suggests.

And so they can. There is some vagueness about whether Ole came to Minnesota alone or with his parents, but he married Lisa (no one could remember her last name) in that state. The youngest son in the photograph was born in 1906, so it probably was taken about 1916; he looks about ten years old and baby Clarence is not yet present. The little girl drowned in the mill pond soon after the sitting. Accidents frequently happened to small children, and parents were much too busy providing for the whole family to be able to devote full time to tailing a toddler. After this, Ernest was designated to help his mother, for there was too much household work for one person to do, and they preferred not to hire a girl from outside the family. When baby Clarence grew older, he assumed this set of tasks. Lisa died of a lingering and undiagnosed illness in the early to mid 1920s.

The farm did indeed prosper because all of the labor was unpaid, no debts were contracted, there was no dependence on wage labor, and the family could survive on what it produced, independent of a monied economy. The depression of the 1930s would not have had much of an effect, except that the sons apparently divided up the Great Northern stock in 1936 and sold it at a loss.

All of the children received at least a high school education. One wanted to go to college, so the local Lutheran minister taught him Latin, an entrance requirement of the school. The lad continued in the field and served as a professor of classics at the University of Iowa until he retired. This encouraged a younger brother, who went on to Columbia University for a Ph.D. in education, later serving as the director of rural education in Connecticut. One son became a banker; one operated a hardware store; and the eldest worked the family farm, which he inherited. Father, Ole, did not remarry after Lisa died. He remained on the farm and worked it with his son until he died.

Some of the questions about this family can never be answered. Yet the photograph raised them, public records provided some leads, and family stories both confirmed and detailed the account that emerged. Many questions still remain, but such is the nature of history.

Joseph M. Hawes is a professor of history at the University of Memphis. His most recent work is Family and Society in American History (2001), which he coedited with Elizabeth I. Nybakken. He is currently working on an encyclopedia of the American family for ABC-CLIO.

Elizabeth I. Nybakken is an associate professor at Mississippi State University, specializing in colonial and women’s history. Her most recent publications are articles on eighteenth-century American education and Family and Society in American History (2001), coedited with Joseph M. Hawes. She taught high school in California and Delaware and has won three teaching awards at MSU.