Will Aunt Rena please stand up?

Aunt Rena & Eleanor Cannan

Me a year ago when I bought this photo: Even though this photo doesn't have a photographer's mark with a location, I bet I can find an Eleanor Cannan with an Aunt Rena! I'll buy it!

Me today: WHY DID I BUY THIS PHOTO?!?!

Needless to say, my search is not going well. So I figure this photo is probably from 1920-1930 based off Aunt Rena's dress? That narrows down when baby Eleanor could have been born. Since my initial FamilySearch peek gave me Eleanor Cannan b. 1930 in NJ, Eleanor Cannan b. 1903 in Pennsylvania and Eleanor Cannan b. 1819 on the Isle of Man.... I decided to just go for NJ Eleanor.

Eleanor Cannan was born February 11, 1930 to Charles Henry Cannan and Hazel A Irwin in Camden, New Jersey. She married Robert B Morris April of 1952 and died May of 1995.

Click me to make me legible.

And as you can see from what I've thrown together on Ancestry, she had no shortage of aunts.... but none of them were named Rena. Unless it was a nickname that I have no documentation of. Seemed like her aunt Emily Catherine went by Catherine for a while.... and I can see that maybe be shortened to Rena. Or Elnora?

OOOOOR....

I have the completely wrong family and this Eleanor Cannan is not my Eleanor Cannan. I'm kind of at a loss. Not sure where I'm going to go from here.

Beulah Althea Peckman

I typed this up in March, and then never published it. Personal fail.

So 2018 has been crazy between work and my dad getting a heart & kidney transplant that it took me until yesterday to realize that it was already March and I hadn't done any research on antique store photos this year and hadn't made a blog post since November. Work was slow-ish this week, so I occupied some spare time by picking out a photo and vowing to research it.

And then I had a moment of ADD and totally ignored that photo, and worked on research for Beulah Althea Peckman's baby photo instead.

Beulah Althea Peckman
Age 7 1/2 mo. Weight 18 lbs.

It's probably more frustrating than the original pic I planned to work on would have been, because I'm just not sure if the info I'm finding is the right person. As you can see, the photographer's mark on the photo is from Bradford, Pennsylvania. The name on the back is very clearly Beulah Althea Peckham. That is a very specific name, so she should be easy to find, right?

Well, I have been record stalking a Beulah Althea Peckham. She was born in New York in June 1892 to Frank Leroy Peckham & Myrta Althia Seely. She went to University of Missouri - Columbia and got her Bachelor of Arts & Bachelor of Science and then went onto Columbia University to get a Masters in Modern History.

I can track her through various school yearbooks both while she was at University of Missouri and later to a high school in New Jersey where he was a teacher.

But I can't for the life of me figure out why she has a baby photo from a photographer in Pennsylvania. :\

The closest I've gotten is finding a 1939 yearbook for a Troy, Pennsylvania where she taught. But that's later in life.... sooooo....

Troy High School, 1939

West Orange High School, 1943

Even though I think the odds are slim, it is entirely possible that there was another Beulah Althea Peckham out there and she is not this baby I bought from an antique store but a completely unrelated woman.

But assuming this isn't an unrelated woman...... I also can't find any siblings, spouses, children.... nada. I can't even find a death date. Beulah is a frustrating woman to research.

JUNE ADDENDUM: So there is a social security record for Beulah Peckham... born October 15, 1892, died June 1977. It seems highly probable this is her. I got the June 1892 from the 1900 census record, buuuuuuut, uh, well census records have been wrong before. But this also means that she likely died unmarried. So I guess her baby photo stays in my photo hoard collection.