On the dresser, in the guest room of her home in a quiet Baltimore suburb, Ellen proudly displays the one hundred and fifty year-old framed photograph of a woman who died long before Ellen was born. If she ever knew the woman’s name or understood her relationship to Ellen’s family, that information has been long forgotten. Whatever significance this photograph may have had to Ellen’s ancestors many years ago has been lost in the years to Ellen and her family.

 

Ellen recalls being told by her paternal grandmother, that the woman in the photo was an early immigrant to this country and an important relative of her (Ellen’s) great grandfather. Ellen was a young child when her grandmother expressed to her the devotion she felt to the woman in this photograph. She can no longer recall exactly what the woman had done during her lifetime to deserve her this devotion, but the reverence and respect her grandmother held for this woman will always be remembered in Ellen’s home.

 

After celebrating her ninetieth birthday Ellen remains sharp and articulate. She remembers her grandmother’s fondness for this photo and claimed it from her parent’s family home in Sunbury, Pennsylvania before it was broken up many years ago. The woman in the photograph appears to be in her sixties or early seventies and although her hair is partially covered, one can see it is gray and thinning. Ellen can see in her face a strong, determined and perhaps shrewd person who must have experienced much during her lifetime.

 

The reverse side of the portrait states that its photographer was “Tyler” of Easton, Pennsylvania. Since her childhood Ellen has known that the Austrian and German Jewish families of her grandmother lived in Easton after immigrating to this country prior to the American Civil War. This photograph was clearly taken during the period of the war. A blue-green “Propriety Stamp” on the reverse side of the photograph stands as proof that a Civil War era tax, a tax that was discontinued after the war, had been paid on the photograph. Ellen can calculate that even her grandmother’s parents would have been much younger than the woman in the photograph during the war between the states, and cannot even speculate who the woman might have been.

 

Michael has recently retired and lives with his wife Suzanne just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Michael has never met Ellen and knows nothing of her family, but he owns a copy of what appears to be the same photograph that Ellen so treasures. His copy of the image has been painted over in oils and has hung for many years in his Atlanta home. He recalls his youth when the portrait hung in his parents’ home. Because his framed print is painted over in oil colors it appears somewhat different from Ellen’s copy, but upon close review, clearly the image in Michael’s photograph is of the same woman, in the same pose, with the same flowing gown, (colored a dark burgundy in Michael’s painted photograph) as the important ancestor that Ellen’s grandmother knew.

 

The long chord necklace worn by the woman in both photographs is gathered through a large white bead, and then runs through the woman’s aging fingers. The thick black stripes of the gowns in both photographs run down the center of the garment and twice around each of the flowing sleeves, giving it the appearance almost of a college graduation gown. The woman in Ellen’s photo is clearly wearing the same dress as the woman in Michael’s painted portrait.

 

It was Michael’s mother, who inherited his copy of the painted portrait from her own mother. She later passed it on to Michael. Michael recalls being told that the woman portrayed in the photograph was somehow important to his family’s history, but according to Suzanne, her mother-in-law was not a good historian and the exact relationship has been forgotten.

 

My father, Leonard Dreifuss never saw either these photographs and he never met Ellen, Michael or anyone from their families. But Leonard grew up in Brooklyn, New York with unresolved questions of his own grandfather’s immigration from Germany soon after the Civil War to live in a Pennsylvania town called Selinsgrove  . Ellen’s grandmother had lived in Selinsgrove after her family (Ellen’s great grandparents) moved from Ellen’s birthplace in nearby Easton Pennsylvania where the logo on the photograph suggests that it was taken. Michael’s ancestors also once resided in Easton but apparently not in Selinsgrove.

 

Leonard would have understood the reverence that Ellen and Michael hold for the unknown ancestor in the portrait, but he could not have known of the connection between the woman in photograph and his own family.

 

Leonard’s father, Joseph Isaac Dreifuss remembered his Selinsgrove family and passed some of their history to his only son. As Leonard aged he began to share his father’s stories of his family in Selinsgrove with his own sons. Perhaps Leonard had been hesitant to speak to his children about this part of his family history earlier because, notwithstanding Joseph Isaac’s stories, he knew so little about it. After all, his grandfather had died in 1909, seven years before Leonard was born, and when he grew up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s, none of his family had remained in Selinsgrove. Leonard never knew his Selinsgrove ancestors. All he knew was stories. Later in life Leonard would regret not having asked his father more questions about this part of his family.

 

When Leonard retired, he began to research his family’s genealogy and took it upon himself to delve into the secrets of his Selinsgrove family. As he began to share what he remembered of the Selinsgrove stories with his sons, they began to refer to Leonard’s, apparently lost, Pennsylvania family as his “Selinsgrove Connection.”

 

Leonard’s connection to this unknown part of his ancestry was not unlike the attachment that Ellen and Michael must feel to the unknown woman in their two, near identical, photographs which for so long had been cherished by both of their families. But ironically, it is the family research that Leonard began late in his life that now suggests that the woman in Ellen and Michael’s photographs would have known all about his Selinsgrove connection.