Identifying Unidentified Family Photos!

I was excited to get this photo of the Kraatz family and Anna and Carl Spohr from Ray Kraatz.

Just now while I was gathering together those photos to post along with the Kraatz family photo, for some reason I decided to open up a folder of old photos on my computer. When I was visiting my grandparents’ house during my college years, I scanned numerous old photos, including many that my grandparents were unable to identify. Since my great grandpa, Carl Spohr Sr., was a photographer, he took lots of photographs of family members, but also of friends and people in the town, so many of these unidentified photos may be of people who are not even related to us. I didn’t have much hope of ever identifying any of the people in the photos, but I wanted to keep copies, just in case.

So, when I was glancing through this folder of over 200 unidentified photos, I was very excited to come across this one:

It is clearly Agnes Laura Schaefer Kraatz, from the Kraatz photo that Ray sent. In fact, I believe that the two photographs were taken at the same time, since she is even wearing the same clothes. I had always wondered who the woman in this photo was, because of the unique border around the picture that 'matches' the one of Anna Marie Ott Spohr and her young son, Carl (my great grandpa).

So when I came to the next photo in the folder, I was excited to again be able to identify the woman in this third ‘matching’ photo as Laura Kraatz (the daughter of Agnes Laura Schaefer and William Kraatz) from Ray’s photograph. All of these women are wearing the same clothes as in the group shot, so I think it’s reasonable to say that the whole set of photos was taken at the same time.

I figured that I was lucky to have identified these two photos (since I never even imagined I would be able to identify any of them), and that it wasn’t likely I’d be able to identify any of the others, but I decided to look through all of the unidentified photos in the folder, and I came across one last one. This is the exact same shot at the one Ray sent me, except it is zoomed out to show their St. Louis, Missouri home.

This made me take a closer look at the photo that I had of Anna and young Carl, and by looking at the group shot of the Kraatz family, I could tell that the boy in that picture (who Ray had identified as Carl’s brother, Louis), is wearing the same outfit as Carl is. The boy in the group shot is wearing a hat, and the picture of Carl and Anna has no hat. By comparing my photo of Anna and Carl to my photo of Carl and his brother Louis, it looks to me that it is Carl in the picture of Anna and Carl. Carl and Louis were close in age and looked pretty similar – I believe that my photo of Anna and Carl, and the Kraatz family group photograph show the same boy, my great grandfather Carl John Spohr.

But isn’t this so cool? Wow!