Quite a few years ago, my mother gave me a very old photo album which she said had been her mother's. It measures 6 inches by 5 inches. "Album" is embossed in gold on its spine. Some of its pages had been cut out and are missing. All the pages have come unbound and one of its cover's metal clasps is broken off. Some of the pictures have fallen out of their mountings. The album's pages and most of its pictures are worn and discolored. Some of the subjects of the photographs were identified by pencilled notes and others were not. I set the album aside, then picked it up once again when I became more interested in family history matters.
My further study of the photo album and of the people whose pictures are preserved in it convinces me that the album belonged originally to my great-grandparents, John Wesley and Sarah Elizabeth (Voss) Walker. The handwriting in which people's names were written doesn't seem to be that of my grandparents, but of somebody from a generation before theirs. It resembles the handwriting in Wesley and Sarah's family Bible. Also, one of the photos is marked "Grand Father Cook", which would identify the album's owner as Sarah Elizabeth, or perhaps one of her siblings or first cousins.
We've placed all the pictures from Sarah Walker's album in our Bloomington scrapbook for you to enjoy. I welcome any information which my Walker or Voss cousins might be able to provide me about the photographs in great-grandma's album. These photos seem to date from roughly 1850 to 1880, so there may not be anybody alive who recognizes the people in the pictures, but perhaps one of you has a photo of one of them which does have a name on it.
This page was last updated 2 Nov 2003.