Sepia Saturday #165; Unkown folks from Benton and Wasco Counties

The theme for today is "Group Portrait of an Unknown Family". As said in Sepia Saturday. "All lovers of old photographs are familiar with unknown people, unknown families and unknown places, we all have them in our collection, and Sepia Saturday 165 provides an opportunity to give them their moment in the limelight, not because of who they are but because of who they may be."   And so it is with this collection of pictures, some group, some not, that most likely is connected to my Keyes ancestors in Oregon. Their 1870s  arrival  in eastern Oregon was via Benton County, Isthmas of Panama, Tennessee, Virginia, and back to Ireland and the Scots border lands.  The following "unknown" pictures came to me from a Keyes cousin, who had "rescued" a number of old albums  that had apparently been in the Brown, Keyes, Butler and Donnelly families.  The lovely old fashioned albums were in disrepair -- cut up, pages torn out, pictures removed, and discarded as trash.


This first picture shows two young boys in The Dalles,Oregon, circa  1880s. The photographer was F. J. Gerhes. In the 1850s through  1870s, The Dalles was the County Seat for most of eastern half Oregon, and continued to be an important city on the Columbia for all of eastern Oregon.

The  picture below is a tintype of two unknown men. They each have a faint familiar look, and could be from the Keyes, Brown, or Donnelly families in either Corvallis, The Dalles, or Mitchell, Oregon.

The following  two pictures were taken by Ted Brown, a photographer who apparently took a number of tures in the Mitchell-Fossil area of eastern Oregon. The young men are most likely of the Keyes, Donnelly or Butler families --- all of whom were inter-related.

The couple below were photographed in The Dalles, Oregon, by C. M. duVall, photographer.

A group picture of a young family. No indication of a photographer, but there was a notation Canyon City (a small town just south of John Day, Oregon) that "might" have gone with this picture.

The following picture is a tintype and was found with other tintype pictures of my Benton County Keyes family.  If I had to hazard an educated guess, I would say this was Rebecca Jane Keyes Donnelly.

And now a family group picture.  However, I really do know all of the young people in this picture. I am thinking it was taken in 1875, just before the wedding of Margaret Delilah Keyes to Abiather Barrett Newton.  My great grandfather James Edward Leonardis Keyes returned to the family home in Benton County to attend his sister's wedding.  He and his cousin Zachary Taylor Keyes were building a sheep ranch near Mitchell, Oregon.

Keyes Siblings, circa 1875
Back Row, L-R, Alexander Doran, James E. L., and John Ward Keyes
Front Row, L-R, Margaret D., Rebecca  J., and Orena Cordelia Keyes

This post is part of a series of posts for Sepia Saturday, which provides an opportunity for bloggers to share their history through photographs. You can view more Sepia Saturday images here. 

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 © Joan G. Hill, Roots'n'Leaves Publications