I LOVE this sweet photo of my great-grandmother and her cousin. Blanche is my great-grandmother and the creator of this album. Louise is her 1st cousin, daughter of Louise Delina Cheney & George Bloomfield Willis. Their common grandparents are Joseph Thompson Cheney & Louise Maria Austin.
The Louise in the photograph was just a name in my tree before seeing this photo. I still don’t know much about her, but I can see that in FamilySearch she was widowed twice. Her first husband, Joel Alonzo Jenks, died just four years after their marriage. He appears to be a very interesting man. He was twenty-seven years her senior and had two marriages apparently end in divorce before marrying Louise. After his death, Louise married Henry Lawrence Olsen who was a widow. Just shy of two years later, Henry died leaving Louise a widow once again. She married again to John Jacob Dolson. They were married for nearly twenty-seven years until her death in 1976. So far, I have only found evidence of one child for Louise.
This album is causing me to get to know cousins I probably wouldn’t otherwise spend any time on. What a great gift!
Now about that photo… someone had cut it into an oval. I was able to get it mostly edited into a rectangle. But when I got to Louise’s dress, I was stuck! So I reached out to my friend Ashlee and she finished up my editing job lickity-split. Like in a few minutes. She is a Photoshop wiz!!
If you have any photos that need repair, you can see some of Ashlee’s work here and see her (amazingly reasonable) prices here. Her photography blog can be found here.
This photo comes from the twenty-eighth page of the album. Here are pages twenty-eight and twenty-nine to give context for this photo:
This post is part of a series sharing this wonderful old family photo album. You can learn more about the album here.
Wonderful photograph. And how did Ashlee know there would be a second button on the dress? Why did you want to convert the photo from an oval to a rectangle?
Thank you, Amy! You can see a bit of the second button in the oval version of the photo if you make it a bit bigger by opening it in its own window.
Good question. The oval wasn’t a very smooth cut. I tried to just smooth it out at first but it was easier to just make it a rectangle. I’m very easily distracted so I usually try to eliminate/repair any distracting elements at the edges of photos. But I will add that I always keep the original scan as well, just as it is. 🙂