Our Favorite Victorian Photographs

[Susan Higginbotham]

I started collecting photographs from this era about six months ago. I have many favorites (including the unidentified lady in my profile picture, from a studio in Frederick, Maryland), but here are two:

This is an ambrotype of an unidentified lady. As a wearer of glasses, I can't resist a fellow spectacles-wearer:



This is Nina Evans, who lived in Washington, D.C. before and after the war. (Her family spent the war years in Philadelphia.) One thing I like to do is trace the identified subjects in the photos I have, and I found that Nina (who married a man called Bartram Zevely and ended up living in Colorado) was a cousin of Admiral "Fighting Bob" Evans, and a sister of Matilda Coxe Stevenson, an early female anthropologist. Nina's father, Alexander Evans, was a lawyer who also headed the Associated Press for a while.