Someone is collecting my Aunt Bert...

[lblanchard]

Funny how Teh Internets bring people together. My great great aunt Alberta Henrietta Hungerbuehler (1872-1968) took art classes at a place called the Spring Garden Institute in the 1880s. The Institute had competitions and struck medals for the winners. Bert won a couple.

Which are being collected by a fellow from, I think, Minnesota, who is on the board of the American Numismatic Association (these are the coin collectors rather than the scholars). He contacted me after finding this photo on Flickr:


Bert is the one on the top row with the lace explosion at her throat

So in about an hour I'll be pedaling over to the convention center to meet the collector and see Bert's medals. He started giving me a labored explanation of how to get to A Hall, which is -- the location of the major exhibits at the Flower Show! Anyhow, I'll see Bert's medals and the one her sister Amelia got and he'll give me a copy of the article he wrote for their magazine. In return I'll let him see Bert's baby picture and some other old photos and will give him a photo of her as an old woman, printouts of some photos of her better artwork, and a sketch or two.

I wish I had more pictures of Bert as a young woman, but she was the family photographer in the 1890s and early 1900s so she was on the wrong side of the lens for too many photos.

I believe I am the last living family member to have known Bert. In a sense, she lives on for as long as I do, but when I go she'll be well and truly dead.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

She sounds like she was a very interesting and gifted person, perhaps ahead of her time! I mean, it was not so unusual for ladies to paint and stuff, but if she was the family photographer...

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I just dug out a letter her kid brother wrote to their mother in 1910. He mentions the arrival of "Bert's little camera-attachment" and says he's enclosing it. I think Bert may have gone up to join their mother in Scranton. He also says that Bert had found a stash of glass negatives that she and Flora had taken with their "Vive" camera and that he had looked them over and printed some of the best. He may have been appointed the family darkroom person, being a physician and therefore a sort of chemist.

I have three albums of negatives from the early 1910s, all with indices written in Bert's careful hand. I'm almost certain that she took this delightful picture of her mother:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/lblanchard/2199140467/)

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

oh, this is lovely!

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Your great-great aunt was kinda hot -- she had that whole intense intellectual smouldering gaze thing going.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

She'd probably have whacked you with her palette if you'd said that to her face. She was pretty Victorian.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Nice looking lady, your great great aunt Bert! And a photographer...I would have liked to have known her as that was most unusual for her day.
She has a penetrating gaze as well.
:)
People do well and truly die when their last living relative/friend acquaintance leaves the earth.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

EDIT: Meant to say that I think they liked to keep abreast of technology. The Spring Garden Institute offered art classes but it was mainly intended for mechanical/technical training. The country's largest locomotive works, Baldwin Locomotives, was right across the street from the Institute and used its buildings for management training in the off-season.

A lot of family history was lost when my parents downsized and sold unsorted boxes of stuff at auction in the late 70s, and then when my father surreptitiously moved out a bunch of stuff to a storage locker that he then didn't pay for. The random survivals are tantalizing, though, like the letter talking about the negatives and the deep red portulaca that was blooming along with Alma's rose.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

So your father abandoned family history in a storage locker?

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

That's as far in the direction of that piece of family history as I care to go...EDIT: Let's just say my parents hit a very rough patch, interpersonally and financially, back in the 1980s.