The Memoirs of John Andrews, Part 2a - That Daguerreotype

Here is the previous entry in the series of The Memoirs of John Andrews: Part 2: Relatives and Travels


The 1853 Daguerrotype of John Andrews

I found among my things one of the daguerreotypes of John Andrews. This is not the one my aunt and I have been wanting, which we know was given by a cousin to a little museum in southern Indiana, which has since gone out of business and its holdings are who-knows-where now. This is a different one, and I think it might be the one he had done when in New York in 1853. I also found the one of his sister, Harriet!

Very excited to get these published here.

Here is the original of John, which has sadly begun to deteriorate. The color tinting is what makes me wonder whether this is really the 1853 version or a later version.

I took a picture with my DSLR camera and created a black and white image that I then worked on, pixil by pixil. I am not anything close to a professional so the enhanced version is not very good, really, but at least I think it makes him look better than with those ugly blotches on his face!

As always, you can click the pictures to see them in their original size.










Here are my two black and white versions.

Now here is Harriet Andrews. Since in this photograph she seems to be wearing a wedding ring (remember that daguerreotypes were actually mirror images of the person photographed), this makes me wonder more whether these two pictures were made later than 1853. I guess we will never know for sure!

Here is the next part of the Memoirs: Part 3, Farm Inventions, Politics, and Business