WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE, AND WHY DID GRANDMA SAVE THIS PICTURE?

Cooper-Best Family Reunion Circa 1904

There are 75 individuals in this picture.   It was given to me about 1987 by my grandfather Robinson's first cousin Harry Klepinger.  I easily recognized my great great grandfather, David Cooper sitting in the first row off the ground...what I've since come to call Patriarch row. Harry told me that it was a picture of a Cooper & Best Family reunion.  His parents are on the far right side and two of his older siblings are standing high in the back row but he didn't remember who many of the others were and he didn't have any idea what the location was or the occasion, other than a "reunion". David Cooper was Harry's maternal grandfather.  The only identification on the picture was written on the reverse indicating the names of the two families involved.  Coopers and Bests.  David Cooper was married to Amanda Best and she had died before this picture was taken.  In a closer examination with a magnifying glass I realized that three of David Cooper's children were also present, William P. Cooper, Kate Klepinger, and Mary Schoonover.  My own great grandmother and any of her family seemed to be missing.  Everyone else was a mystery.      This might have remained a mostly unidentified picture but for two reasons.   Collaboration, and the internet.  For several years this remained in a folder of other Cooper family pictures and data.

A few years later I connected with Cheryl Hipp, a great great granddaughter of Isaac Newton Best and we exchanged some family data. Isaac was the brother of Amanda Best Coooper.   I had started scanning my old family photographs and I sent Cheryl a copy of this image telling her the names of those I knew and asking if she recognized anyone else in the picture based on the old family photographs she had in her possession.  Imagine my surprise when she wrote back and told me that she also had that very picture in her own collection and that she knew which was her great grandfather and grandfather.  

If descendants of both Amanda and Isaac had copies there must have been many copies of the image given to others who were in attendance that day and while we are still waiting for another copy to turn up we have been able to identify several other family members based on other photographs posted to various family trees at Ancestry.com and others by simply going through our own collections.

One of the first chores we accomplished was figuring out the year it was taken.   Since Amanda was not in the picture we knew it was taken after her death in 1896.   We also realized that William P. Cooper's wife, Lottie was standing next to him and she died in June 1905.  So there we had our brackets.   Fashions are ever changing, and because of that change it is often possible to date an image with a fair amount of accuracy based only on the clothing being worn in the picture, and this picture is loaded with fashion hints all of which point to the first decade of the 20th Century.

Cheryl sent copies of the picture to several other Best family researchers she was exchanging information with asking for them to look for anyone they might recognize. We made a low resolution copy of the image and numbered each person then Cheryl made a spread sheet and we plugged in the names next to the numbers of those we knew.  That led us to thinking more about the image in a couple of different ways.   First....what event was this?  Was it just a run of the mill family reunion or was something else going on?  Had the family gathered for a celebration of a birthday or wedding anniversary, or maybe even a funeral?   Cheryl and I had both started out calling it a picture of a Cooper/Best family Reunion...and then we started thinking about family reunions and other family gatherings.  In our experience two large families might come together for a funeral or wedding, but usually other gatherings involve one side of your family or the other, not usually both.   David Cooper was married to Amada Best, and her brother Isaac N Best was married to David's sister Rebecca....so there was more than the average mixing between those two families, but still it seemed to me that if it were a family reunion it was probably for one famil or the other, not both, except those that intermarried.  Keeping that in mind it's probably safe to assume the majority of the others are going to be members of that family.

The presence of Henry Best, older brother of Amanda and Isaac N in the photo along with some of his children seem to tip the balance toward this being a Best family reunion picture.   Also present was David and Rebecca's brother Benjamin Cooper, but his presence at a Best family function is easily explained because he was making his home with his sister Rebecca and her family at this time. Henry Best, on the other hand had lived in Iowa for many years indicating a trip back to Indiana required a sort of special effort and his presence at a Cooper family reunion would seem less likely. 

Two additional spreadsheet pages were created to help us evaluate the image and those who might have been present.  One was a list of the various Best family members who might have attended and their ages and known residences in 1900.  The other was for the Cooper family members who might have attended along with ages and residences.     We have assumed that those in attendance were probably all descendants of Isaac and Jane Best, early pioneers of Tippecanoe County, along with those members of the Cooper family who had married into the Best family.   Isaac and Jane had ten children, but by 1905 only three remained, Isaac N, Henry, and Samuel who died in July of that year.  However, many of Isaac and Jane's grandchildren and great grandchildren were alive in 1905.  It is possible that the invitation extended beyond the families of the children of Isaac and Jane and perhaps some cousins might have shown up also.

We now have positive or nearly positive identifications of 23 of the faces in this picture, but neither of us are ready to throw in the towel.  Though not yet half done, both Cheryl and I feel there is hope that we might eventually figure out as many as half of these people, or maybe somewhere in a box someone has another copy of this picture on which the original owner wrote the names of everyone. Wouldn't that be nice!

Just because you don't know everyone in your old family pictures doesn't mean they can't be figured out with some effort and help from others and a bit of luck.  There are some good books devoted to working with your old family photographs.  Well worth the cost if you are serious about working with the old photos.