Some Time Later

some-time-laterWhen I was first examining the glass negatives that comprised the Capewell Collection, I wasn’t sure what or who I was looking at. The sheer number of them was overwhelming at first, and it wasn’t until I photographed them and started to “process” the images on my computer that I started to be able to pick out individuals and make guesses as to who was related to whom. Of course, the research of this site’s fantastic readership helped a great deal giving me names to go with the faces.

I didn’t recognize the man in the above picture  during my first pass, but after a while, I came to realize that this was a somewhat older John B. Capewell posing in front of something he built with a couple of children.

some-time-later-detJohn had gone gray and is a little wider around the middle, but it’s him all right. I can tell by the shape of his head and his protruding ears.

I’m not sure who the kids are. John and Ella did not have grandchildren.

They all look to be dressed in a period later than the majority of the pictures. Maybe it’s the 1930s. John probably decided to pull out the old camera equipment and see if it would still work. It did.

some-time-later-2I’m not sure what the structure was that Capewell seemed so very proud of. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s sitting in Capewell’s yard in Westville, New Jersey.

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!

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12 Responses to Some Time Later

  1. Old NFO says:

    Looks like a play house of some kind…

  2. Larry Hill says:

    The two children with John B. Capewell are without a douby, my mother, Emily Regina Thomas, and her brother David Thomas. They spent a lot of time at John and Nanny’s, [Ella Regina (Evans) Capewell] home.

  3. Larry Hill says:

    When Uncle Bud (Henry Capewell) passed away, Aunt Annie, Anne (Phifer) Capewell, had tons of stufff she asked me to take out of the house, the same day when we came home from the funeral, including flintlock rifles! I felt strange about doing it, and said I would take things at a more appropriate time, but she started putting things on the curb in the next few days (Westville police got the flintlocks’ I think!). I have the ceramic black dog, who wears “Ruff”‘s dog tag (Uncle Bud’s biggest retriever) because that big wiry haired dog was one of my best friends when I was growing up on the other side of Bud and Anne’s back fence. I even remember sitting at the kitchen table in John and Dorothy Capewell’s house as a child. This is likley the same table that my mother played under when it was Nanny and John B. Capewell’s house. My mother had a lot of original prints from the glass negative collection, which eventually came to me. My wife, being a genealogist, after researching them, decided eventually to get most of the photos to the Gloucester County Historical Society in Woodbury, a few years ago. With help from some other Capewell relations, I think she managed to get nearly all the people in the photos identified, and that information should be at the Histoical Society. Nanny’s (Ella R. (Evans) Capewell) diary is now there also, after my wife transcribed and published that about 15 years ago, as I recall.

  4. Larry Hill says:

    By the way, I went to school with John Williams, and waited for the bus at Broadway and Olive St. with him and his younger sister. Must’ve been Gloucester Catholic, as that is where the Public Service bus stop was.

  5. Joe_Williams says:

    Larry, thanks so very much for the information. Take a look at some of the older posts — I’ve been doing this for a while!
    http://willceau.com/news/category/the-capewell-glass-negative-collection/

  6. Joe_Williams says:

    My brother John and sister Karen are doing well. I’ll let them know that I’ve heard from you.

  7. Ronda Bolinger says:

    thanks to a guy named Shawn who took the time to contact me about this website. So Larry and I could put names to some of these pictures. Thank you Joe for doing this so we can see pictures of our families, Evans and Capewell’s from over 100 years ago..

  8. Joe_Williams says:

    I’m glad you found me!

  9. Lawrence Edgar Hill says:

    I am glad John and Karen are doing well. Just looked in my senior yearbook, and Karen is in there as a sophomore at GCHS, but John was not in the senior class group, did he switch over to Gateway HS, or did he graduate before me (71)? I am confused now! Nothing new!

  10. Joe_Williams says:

    John went to Bishop Eustace. My younger brother and I were the great public school experiment — we Went to Gateway.

  11. Ronda Bolinger says:

    Hi Joe I tried to leave a repsonse for your picture Mama and the boys Aug 2012. could you update that. it is my great great grandmother Helena Evans Ross and her seven boys, John my great grandfather, James, William, George, Frank, Donald and Thomas. oldest is John youngest is Thomas. Not sure which boys are which yet.

  12. Joe_Williams says:

    I’ll edit that over the weekend. I had to turn off comments to some of the older posts because I was getting a lot of spam. Thanks so much!

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