Schmidt family photo c. 1894 in Lexington, Nebraska

The Joseph and Juliana Schmidt Family around 1894. This photo was most likely taken in Lexington, Nebraska while Joseph was stationed in that town while working for Union Pacific Railroad. The photo was unlabeled, but it is pretty clear who most of the people are, but there is also a mystery. The Schmidt’s had six living children at this point, but one of them is missing in this particular photo. The missing child is most likely Joseph Jr. Anna is in the back, the child to the left is most likely Frank, then Joseph Schmidt, Juliana, and Carl. Joseph is holding Louis and Juliana is holding Marie. It is unknown why Joe Jr. was missing from the photo. He would have been 9 years old at the time. The photo is a part of the Froemel family collection held by a Froemel family member. Anna Schmidt married Frank Froemel. They were also distant 3rd or 4th cousins.This photo has also been restored; it needed fairly extensive repairs.

This is such a precious photo of the Schmidt family from around 1894 while the family was living in Lexington, Nebraska. This photo is so precious because it is the only known photo of the whole family during this period of time.

The Schmidt family had six living children by this point, but one of the boys is missing from the photo. A number of family members worked on solving the riddle of who was missing, and the general consensus at this point is that Joseph Jr. is the missing child. This is most likely the case because of the relative ages of each child along with a number of other clues. What follows is the breakdown of the decision making process we went through.

Since Anna and Marie are the only girls and the oldest and the youngest, it is very easy to identify each of them. Joseph and Juliana are also obvious choices. It is the boys that present the only challenge to deciphering this photo. Joseph Jr. (aka Joe, or Black Joe) was born in 1885, Carl was born in 1887, Frank was born in 1889, and Louis (Louie) was born in 1891 (for reference Anna was born in 1879 and Marie was born in 1893). The boy on Joe’s lap is older than baby Marie on Juliana’s lap, but not by a huge amount. He looks to be about 3 years of age and that is consistent with Louie’s age in 1894. You might also notice that Joe has a pretty tight grip on Louie and that would be consistent with the age as well. All of us parents are familiar with wiggly toddlers, and in those days people had to stare at the camera long enough to allow proper exposure of the film and that time standing still seemed unbearable to a toddler.

The boy to the photographer’s left of Joe is older that Louie, but again not dramatically older. I have a 5 year old running around my house and this boy fits the size requirement and frankly my child and this child are almost a carbon copy proportion-wise. It seems very likely this is Frank, my great grandfather. He would have been 5 years old at the time, so this seems a likely hypothesis. My child also stands with her hands as Frank does and even puts her chin in the down position. I have a number of photos of her that are strikingly similar. If you look at a number of Frank’s photos from later years you can see the similarities with the way he tilts his head, the pursing of the lips, the hand position and those very prominent ears (I inherited those myself). It was suggested by some that Frank is actually in Joseph’s lap and that the boy to the left is Carl, but the ages just wouldn’t match. There isn’t enough distance in age between the two boys to be Carl and Frank and there are two other telling physical characteristics of the boy in the lap who is most likely Louie. One is that he always had those bushy eyebrows and two, he is cross eyed in this photo. You can see that same condition in later photos where we know for sure that Louie is the person pictured. I noticed the cross-eyed condition immediately when I discovered this photo in a family member’s collection. It was something I am quite familiar with since I too had crossed eyes as a child. I suffer from Amblyopia and I am pretty sure Louie did as well. At least I now know from which family the condition originated.

The boy to the right of Juliana is either Carl or Joseph. The question really comes down to whether you believe that this child is 7 or 9 years old. Given the relative size and age difference between the child to the left of Joseph and the child in question on the right, they easily look two years apart, but it would be a stretch to say they look 4 years apart. If the child at left is Frank, then the child at right has to be Carl. There just doesn’t look to be 4 years between the two boys. Joe Jr. would be 9 years old by this point and I would expect him to be taller than the boys pictured, especially since his 14 year old sister towers so much so above her much younger siblings.

The boys on the left are from the 1894 family portrait which was not labeled. The other two sections (middle and right) are photos of Louie and Frank as children and as adults. The question is whether the two children at left look substantially like the identified children and adults at center and right to be properly identified. The similarities between the photos are pretty striking. It is an amazing blessing to have enough photos to compare the relative ages.