Daughters and Sons-in-law in an 1850s Photo

Jim TeVogt owns a copy of this gorgeous image, reported to be three of Horace W. Twichell’s daughters and their husbands. A cousin told him that his photo was made from a glass negative in the Twichell family.

Could this be:

• Eveline (born 25 May 1824) married in 1840 to Usual Haggerty Devore (born 1815)
• Emeline (the twin to Eveline, born 25 May 1824) married in 1844 to Petr H. Conklin (born 1822)
• Irene Jane (born 1838) married in 1852 to Will Thomas Cadoo (born 1825)?

There are many questions:

• What type of image is it, as it was supposedly made from a glass negative?
• Who’s who? Are these the twins with another sister?

Here’s what I see:

• All three women wear their hair tight over their ears in the style of the 1840s. It’s a very conservative style. The family were Methodist.
• Each woman Has a flower pinned in the center of the opening of her collar.
• Wide-necked dresses with short sleeves were still being worn in the early 1850s. Each woman has accessorized her dress with a wide collar tucked at the waist.
• The center woman wears a wide bow at the waist. I’ve seen this in photos of weddings.

• The daughter on the far right wears undersleeves to cover her arms. These tied on the arm above the elbow.

Horace Twichell had two other daughters: Harriet (born 1826), who married Daniel Malin in 1845; and Henrietta (born 1831), who married a man named Sulla before 1860.

The only sister the family has a positively identified image of is Harriet and her husband, circa 1870.

This is not one of the sisters or husbands in the first image. This man has bushy eyebrows and is much older than his wife. There are facial similarities between the sisters, such as the shape of the face and nose. Unfortunately, there are no other images of the other sisters and their families.

Wedding clues include the presence of the ribbon, the flowers and the similarly dressed women. So who’s in the possible wedding image? It could very well be the twins Emeline and Eveline with their sister Irene Jane in the middle. Irene married Dec. 15, 1852, which is a likely date for the picture.

As to the relative’s comment about the glass negative, the original for a photo of this era would have been a shiny reflective daguerreotype. Glass negatives weren’t available until after 1852, and glass ambrotypes weren’t patented until 1854. Someone in the family may have copied the original and ended up with a glass negative, from which TeVogt’s image was made.

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