The Forsyth Home, 1895

In the previous installments of this series, we looked at various cabinet cards that were part of Margaret Forsyth's photo collection provided by Nick Hyslop. Today we begin looking at #Cabinet Cards.

The first photo we will look at is that of the home of my great grandparents, William Marion and Margaret (Scully) Forsyth in 1895. The address of the home is 1363 E. Knox St., #Galesburg, Illinois, and can still be seen using Google Maps street view, albeit somewhat modified. In the below photo Margaret (Scully) Forsyth sits holding her infant daughter Edna Margaret Forsyth and to her right standing is my grandfather, the 2 year old William Henry Forsyth. On his right is my great great grandmother, Martha Lurinda (McFarland) Forsyth. The only other photos we have of her are a single portrait of her when she is a young woman and a batch of photos form 1918 when she is in her 70s and holding my father, William David Forsythe. In 1895, Martha was living in Galesburg, Illinois, but whether in the same home or not, I do not know. Martha had three sons. The eldest, Alpha Layson Forsyth died in 1881. The second, Joel Madison Forsyth, only had one son, and he was not born until the following year. So here we see Martha along with her first two grandchildren. We don't know why her son William was not in the photo. They did not own a camera, and this photo appears to have been taken with a professional camera.

The next photo is a detail from the above photo. I photographed the original photo using a digital camera, and for this version, I zoomed in on just this part of the photo.

You may notice that the detail photo above shows quite of few scratches, tears and markings that are not apparent in the larger photo. That is because I cleaned up the large photo using Adobe Photoshop. In the below side-by-side comparison, both photos are shown overlapping. You can move the center slider to the left and right with your mouse or tap on any area of the photo to see the before and after effect.

 

And finally, in this next photo, provided earlier by Mary Bouschard, we see the same house photographed in about 1900, with Edna, William Marion and my ever so cool grandfather, the 7 year old Willie Forsyth.

In the next installment, we will look continue to look at other cabinet photographs from this collection.