Here’s a shot of John Capewell’s wife, Ella, on the far right, a trio of children and an older woman who may be Ella’s mother all sitting in the shade by a river or a lake.
It may have been late in the day because the exposure is fairly dark and there wasn’t a lot of detail for my camera to grab a hold of.
This photo looks like it relates to some other “summer vacation” shots I posted earlier. The children look like the same kids in my Wading Children and a Rowboat post, and the older woman looks to be the same one in my Lady by the Water post. It’s probably the same body of water in each one of these posts, but sadly there is not enough of it pictured to make an identification. It might be New Jersey. It might be anywhere.
Here is the entire glass negative:
About The Capewell Glass Negative Collection
The Capewell Glass Negative Collection is a series of about 200 5-inch by 7-inch glass negatives shot early in the 20th Century by John Batt Capewell (1878-1951) of Westville, New Jersey. John passed the negatives down to his son Henry who left them in his wife’s possession upon his passing. Henry’s widow didn’t know what to do with them and didn’t particularly want them so she offered them to my Dad who couldn’t turn down anything. Ultimately I wound up with them and thought I would one day have photographic prints struck from them. That didn’t happen, but I came up with the digital workaround of placing the negatives on a lightbox and rephotographing them with a digital camera. The “processing” was then done on a computer with image editing software. They came out better than I thought they would so I thought I would show them off to the world on this site. Many of these pictures have not been seen in a century, and I’m proud to be presenting them today.
At first, I did not know who the people were in the photographs. I have a box of ephemera that accompanied the negatives and snagged a few clues from that as far as the Capewell name. I did some research on the internet and had a few false starts and wrong turns, but the readers of these posts have provided a remarkable amount of research and detail. I’m amazed at what people have turned up sifting through public records and such!
Last: Twins or a Double Exposure?
