Don’t be scared, but there may be strangers in your house.
Anyone lucky enough to inherit their family’s photo album must have wondered about some of the folks in there. Are there unlabeled Victorian-era portraits where people look as stiff as statues? Maybe there are snapshots from a century ago of relatives posing with seemingly close friends – but could they be distant relations you’d like to know about? There may also be missing persons. Why do none of the photos with great-aunt Tilda include her husband Cornelius?
This is a quick trip through a collection of pictures left by a Santa Rosa family from around the turn of the century. Or rather, it’s about forty images that were donated to the Sonoma County Library, which scanned them and placed them online. Not all of the set is interesting – about half are nameless, rigid-necked Victorians – but some are quite unusual and deserve attention. The final section of this article concerns the more serious question about what could be done to restore information missing from thousands of historical photos in our library’s archive and elsewhere.
The first puzzle is figuring out which family we’re looking at. The library’s descriptions usually mention “William H. Hudson” or “part of a collection of Hudson family photographs” but that’s a weak clue, as there were several unrelated Hudson clans in the North Bay at the time and three included a William H. living in Santa Rosa, St. Helena and Petaluma. A few years ago the Sonoma County Historical Society wrote a piece on this and concluded a Santa Rosa businessman was the right guy.1
But in the library collection three different men are identified as William H. Are their photos mislabeled or were these really the trio who shared the same name? And which one is the businessman we seek? Fortunately, he was vain enough to buy an entry in one of the local history “mug books” so we have an accurate reference of what he looked like, at least in his senior years.2
RIGHT: William Hall Hudson (1855-1927)
That history book offers a detailed bio or you can read a condensed version at his entry on Find a Grave (although it presently uses photos of wrong Williams). Here I’m skipping most of the details except for those that apply to the photographs.
Overlooked was that William and his wife Percie had very private lives. Rarely were they mentioned in any of the local newspapers. Aside from a nice announcement in the paper where he once worked as a printer, their marriage was elsewhere a two-line notice in the Vital Statistic columns. There were no birth announcements for their children, even though she was part of a large and prominent Healdsburg family.
Their quiet profile extended to the family album. There’s no wedding photo, nor baby pictures, nor portraits of their son in Army uniform as he went off to fight in WWI, nor picture of the son with his wife or of their children. (Think about that for a moment: Grandparents without a single photograph of their grandkids?!) I want to assume such images did exist and at some point a family member raided the album, but the Hudson’s seeming desire to live behind closed doors does not lend great confidence.
The iconic picture in the library’s Hudson set portrays a man and woman with their backs turned. The Sonoma Historian newsletter printed it in 2010 as a “mystery photo” and it can also be spotted on social media, where it’s usually tagged as being funny. It may indeed be a gag photo; we have no information about it or if the couple is Percie and William.
We can date it to around the late 1880s because of the “Souvenir Studio” credit.3 Photographer Jim Piggott seemed to be a light-hearted fellow who might encourage goofiness; his advertising motto was “A man may have A BAD DISPOSITION Nevertheless he may conceal it by having his photos taken at the Souvenir Studio.”
Also in that period the Hudsons lost a child – the mug book biography stated one of their two kids died in infancy. We can guess that happened in 1886 or 1887 because an item in the May 1886 Democrat noted Percie had returned to Santa Rosa from a long visit in the Midwest with her “little daughter” Ethel. Per the Hudson’s pattern of reclusiveness, there was no death notice, as there had been no birth announcement.4
This photo is likely a “mourning portrait” taken to memorialize Ethel’s passing. Americans in the Victorian era were somewhat more restrained than their Brit cousins in taking creepy post-mortem photographs of their dead and poses similar to this were an alternative. The symbolic objective was to conceal faces of the mourners because they could not bear to be seen, as they were wracked with indescribable grief. (Some were quite artistic, with the eyes and upper face hidden in noir-like shadow or the head sharply turned away from the camera.)
Seven portraits in the library’s Hudson family collection are supposedly William as a child, but like the adult portraits they appear to be two (or more?) boys; colors of the eyes and hair vary and the ears may jut out (or not). In one bizarre offering the boy’s hair is crudely drawn in along with his eyebrows, which were placed so high on his forehead he could pass for a Vulcan.
Another quirky example of Victoriana can be spotted in the portrait that’s assumed to be William at age six or seven. Notice the curtain is unusually draped behind his right arm and over the corner of the chair. That was a typical trick used to conceal a mother or other adult for what’s now called “hidden mother photography.”
As the Wikipedia page explains, it was difficult to keep small children completely still during the long exposure times required by early cameras, yet the Victorians didn’t want the distraction of including an adult in the picture. Their solution was to hide the mother under a blanket or behind something, such as the curtain seen here. Presumably the mother is clutching the boy’s hidden left hand and chanting, “holdstillholdstillholdstill…”. Hidden mothers were most commonly used while photographing infants, but perhaps William was an unusually squirmy child.
The library caption on this image is incorrect, as his only daughter died in infancy. We don’t know who she is, but comparing this man to the portrait in the history mug book shows this is indeed William, and is the only bonafide picture of him in the Hudson family collection.
Today we would call William an entrepreneur, as during most of his adult life he owned and operated different businesses at the same time. Trained as a printer he became the proprietor of hotels in Ukiah and Windsor. His main income came from plants that bottled soda pop and mineral water, which he ran in Mendocino and Southern California before buying the Santa Rosa Bottling Works in 1887.
The girl’s fan advertises “Sassafras Sour” which was probably among the brands of root beer he made under license. Other carbonated soft drinks included “Cresta Blanca” (not the wine), “Ly-nola” (described as a ‘fruit beverage’), “Oyster Cocktail” (stored at room temperature for how long?), “Whistle” (maybe the best name ever for a soda) and “Dr. Swett’s” (maybe the worst).
William upgraded his bottling plant on West Third and the Press Democrat ran little items about new state-of-the-art carbonation machines and such. He expanded his territory and opened a branch store in Occidental before selling the business and retiring in 1924.
“Dear Dr. Freud; please take a look at this photograph. Seriously, WTF? Sincerely, William, Santa Rosa Ca.” [parody]
This advertisement cabinet card is the oddest artifact in the Hudson collection and, I’ll wager, the champion oddity in the library’s entire photo archive. Nothing is known about it except that the back reads, “‘Compliments of Tom Spencer, Livingston & Co.’ for Gold Lion whiskey, 1234 Deer Run”.
William likely had this because of another of his companies. From 1892 to 1901 he had the largest retail and wholesale liquor store in Santa Rosa, first on Exchange Avenue then moved to lower Fourth St. Yet curiously, he later acted as if it never existed – that long-running business went unmentioned in his history book bio and in the obituaries.
The Hudson album also included a souvenir card from a circus sideshow with Anna and Martin Van Buren Bates, the “tallest couple in the world” according to a blurb printed on the back. The man of “ordinary” height next to them was about six feet tall. The Bates were part of the W. W. Cole circus which played Santa Rosa on October 6, 1880.
It was not uncommon to include such photos in a family album. My own family’s collection had a portrait from about that same time of an adult couple with dwarfism, but no caption explaining who they were or if they were relations. (This caused high anxiety in my cousin when we were kids, as she was slightly shorter than her schoolmates and convinced herself she had stopped growing.)
This keepsake cabinet card and the whiskey ad above make the point the albums weren’t just archives of dead ancestor portraits. They were storybooks. Particularly in the age before radio and TV, the family album was an important source of entertainment – a display of assorted interesting people to talk about. Other identified (and presumably unrelated) portraits connected to the Hudsons included a Petaluma minister and the vice president of the United States under Grover Cleveland.
An album might be pulled from the shelf when relatives or old friends stopped by to visit and the pictures unlocked memories: Perhaps someone would say, “Oh, here’s grandma Gus. Remember how blue were her eyes?” The visitors might chip in with their own stories and for a few nostalgic moments the clock turned back as she was recalled tenderly (or not). And then everyone had a good laugh over the card of the girl with riding crop in her teeth on the next page.
The photo of this unknown workman is (in my opinion) the most intriguing of the Hudson set. There must be quite a tale behind it; Victorian-American tradition was to wear somber “burial clothes” and pose in the style of formal classical painted portraits. Everyone else in the Hudson album was a model of respectability to be honored for a life well lived.
It’s not just that he’s dressed as a heavy laborer and looks like he’s taking a break from ditch digging. His hands are rough, dirty and he’s holding them in a way to draw attention to them. Having that big cigar clenched in his teeth makes him seem all the more defiant over having to sit for a portrait. “Ya’ nagged me for a damned picture and here it is. Hope yer’ happy.”
We don’t know the name of our stogie-chompin’ pal, nor do we know when he was photographed. Among the Hudson set there are eighteen others of unknown people from the family or supposedly connected to them. Of the 31,000+ images in the Sonoma County Library Photograph Collection, I imagine there are easily a thousand with one or more unidentified figures. And that’s just for our little slice of heaven – multiply that by all the holdings in university and library archives and posts on social media nationally. A truly staggering number of pictures show people who have no names and likewise no stories.
With a family album like the Hudsons where nearly half of the entries have no-names, the temptation to speculate can be difficult to resist, even for experienced genealogists. That middle-aged couple photographed in Iowa, where the Hudsons lived when William was a child – it must be safe to assume they are his parents, right? Well, no; they could easily be relatives from far-flung branches on the family tree or just friends.
Is there a solution to this identification problem? I believe there is – or at least, a means to ID lots of these mystery people.
It should come as no surprise that late 19th century studio photographers made their real money on selling copies, not taking the picture itself. Customers were sold packs of cabinet cards like the ones seen above to be given away to family and friends (prices ranged around 4/$1.00 and 12/$2.00). This means there could be surviving duplicates of these cards floating around in other online collections. And some of those surely have details about who’s in them.
Much has been written about AI companies scraping the internet for text that could be reused for apps such as ChatGPT. Lesser known is that they also collect image data on the web and reverse image search apps, such as Google Lens, can find other copies of the same portrait. In theory.
For better or worse you can’t do that, but not for any technical reasons. In Google Lens any image search for a person comes with an alert which reads, “results for people are limited”. Experiments using images from the Hudson collection results in no exact matches but plenty of lookalike portraits, almost all from commercial sources such as eBay, Etsy and antique vendors where they are available for purchase. Yet we know Google has indexed the Sonoma County Library pages because it finds the captions from the photos. What’s going on here?
Google and its ilk are justly concerned image search tools can be used to easily violate privacy – there’s no foolproof way to determine whether the picture of someone’s face came from a century-old source or was taken sans permission using a phone five minutes ago. The risk of all manner of wrongdoing is indefensibly high.
But as you can probably imagine, there’s also plenty of complaining on social media that this approach is overbroad. Not only does it restrict legit research such as genealogy, it also can enable crime by helping identity thieves keep themselves concealed.
Unless I’m missing some fine legal hairsplitting, it seems to me the solution to the researcher’s dilemma is to recognize that exact matches for images now in the public domain are fair game. That’s how Google and Internet Archive handle books; currently anything produced before 1929 (the 95 year limit of copyright) is available for full download without restrictions. Similarly, you should be able to find other copies of your ancestor’s Victorian era portrait if Google et. al. know where they are. Or to put it another way, the search engines with this particular information do not have a legitimate reason to hide it from you.
There’s no dispute Google Lens is the 800 lb. gorilla in the world of reverse image search, so this is an issue only that company can solve. Perhaps they should split off (what surely is) the small niche of historic image searching to a different body, such as an academic institution or Ancestry. They could even drop the facial recognition module – ain’t nobody’s going to use a portrait of your g-grandma to catfish lonely men on dating sites.
Linking all the image archives on the internet with simple matching could be an incredibly powerful tool. Historians may discover photos which were described at the time but have been long considered lost; genealogists could find unknown branches of their family. And we even might learn that all the strange business packed into that whisky ad was just symbolism connected to silly rituals performed by a group like the Elks’ club in the day.
| 1 “Lots of Names, Few Photo IDs” Sonoma Historian 2010 #4, pg. 14-15 |
| 2 Honoria Tuomey, History of Sonoma County, California Vol. II, 1926, pg. 548-549 |
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| 4 Confusing matters further, there was another Santa Rosa girl named Ethel Hudson, born in 1879. She was the daughter of daughter of Henry W. Hudson and on at least one occasion the Democrat confused H. W. Hudson with our W. H. Hudson. It appears there might be a link between those two Hudson families. The mother (Mrs. H. W. Hudson) of 1879 Ethel was part of the Northcutt family. Percie was the aunt of a Miss Lou Northcutt – see reference in sources below. Tracing it further, however, is beyond my genealogical skill set. |
MARRIED. PALMER-HUDSON — In Healdsburg, July 10, 1881, at the residence of the bride’s parents, by Rev. S. A. Taft, Miss Percie Palmer of Healdsburg to Wm. H. Hudson of Ukiah. With the above happy announcement came the largest package of the best-made wedding cake, and we join the many friends in wishing the young couple much joy. The groom is a nephew of T. W. Hudson, Esq., of this city. Arriving in this State a few years ago in his teens, he aided us a few times in printing the Flag; bis course since then has been characterized by enterprise and industry till now, by his own exertiona he has become a partner in a good business in Ukiah, as well as the possessor of one of the fair young ladies of Healdsburg. How many of our young men have made a better record? We congratulate both of the young people and have unbounded confidence in their success and happiness.
– Russian River Flag, July 14 1881Mrs. W. H. Hudson and little daughter Ethel returned from Columbia, Missouri, where they been visting for some time past. Mrs. Hudson’s niece, Miss Lou Northcut, accompanied them, and will spend the summer with her aunt in this city.
– Daily Democrat, May 14 1886
HEART ATTACK HELD CAUSE OF HUDSON DEATH
Retired Businessman, 71, Drops Dead in Street; Final Rites ThursdayWilliam H. Hudson, 71, for 40 years a resident here and founder of the Santa Rosa Bottling Works, dropped dead in Third street within two blocks of his home yesterday morning while on his way uptown. Heart trouble is blamed for his sudden death, although he is said to have been in good health and is reported to have remarked to members of his family before leaving home how well he was feeling. He was picked up by passersby, who saw him fall near the cannery. Although Coroner Fred Young could not be reached last night, it is probable there will be a formal investigation, the date for which has not been set.
Funeral services will be held Thursday afternoon at 2 o’clock from the Welti chapel on Fourth street, with the Rev. J. Allan Price of the Baptist Church officiating. Burial services will be held in Odd Fellow’s cemetery by Santa Rosa Eagles, of which Hudson member. Hudson was born in Missouri on December 24, 1885 [sic], and when a child went to Iowa and then to Nebraska with his parents, where he learned the printer’s trade. On first coming to California in 1882 he entered the hotel business at Ukiah, later establishing a bottling works in Mendocino.
Five years later he transferred the business to Visalia and in 1887 he moved to Santa Rosa, where resumed business. He retired in 1924 and since that time has not been actively engaged in business. He married Miss Percie Palmer. daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. S. Palmer, Healdsburg pioneers, on June 10, 1881. Clyde V. Hudson is the only surviving son of the two children born to the couple.
Besides his son is survived by two sisters, Mrs. Theodicia Schroder and Mrs. Allie Tolson of Long Beach.
– Press Democrat 1 November 1927
