Heirloom Portraits on Your Walls

 

Do you have old portraits of your ancestors? Were they homely people, strikingly attractive, or run of the mill?

When we were stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio about 25 years ago we would occasionally drive the half hour to Waynesville, Ohio to visit the antique shops there. The town had a multitude of shops with troves of dusty and interesting merchandise. We would sometimes buy the odd item on these trips—nothing too expensive.

I was most fascinated with the open tray boxes with hundreds old portraits from studios in Pittsburgh, Columbus, or Chicago. Several of the shops had them. How all these studio file copies of John and Jane Doe’s photos came to be in the possession of antique dealers I don’t know. But I do know that I thumbed through a lot of these photos on every trip to Waynesville. I would sometimes pause on a photo and admire the beauty a photographer had captured. Most of the time, though, I was looking at the faces of people who must have had nice personalities.

I never bought any of those portraits even though they were reasonably priced, but I came to regret it after we had moved from Ohio. You see, only later did it occur to me that there’s no reason to have pictures of homely ancestors on your walls when portraits of handsome people are so readily available. Furthermore, these days you don’t even have to leave your couch to shop for comely forebears. They sell them on eBay! (A recent search turned up over 69 thousand results in the “cabinet photo” category alone.) Really, who’s going to point at your displayed heirloom photo and say, “Those gorgeous people are not your great-great grandparents!”?

I’m kidding, of course. It would be wrong to buy prettier ancestors than you actually have and claim them as your own.

Wouldn’t it?