What is in a photo?

I love this photo. I love how Marguerite is holding her paper and staring directly at the camera, as if we have just interrupted her reading. It is a power pose. She has a serious face as is the norm in photos this period, but I see a smile behind it. And I love the dramatic, ornate wooden chair with the carved lion? faces at the top and paws at the feet. I assume it belonged to the photo studio where the portrait was taken, but Marguerite seems at home in it.

Marguerite (Nebhut) Suess is my third great grandmother. We didn’t know a lot about her until I started digging—inspired by this photo and the mystery of which variation of her maiden name was correct. I am still not sure of the spelling of her first name either since it appears in different ways.

I think this photo was taken in the early 1900s. Anyone with knowledge or interest in fashion - please let me know if her clothes give you any hints as to a date. In 1900 Marguerite would have been about 54, and a widow for the last 6 years. Her two oldest sons were set to be married in the next couple of years, and the youngest would marry five years later for the first time. I wonder if this photo wasn’t taken in relation to one of the weddings; Marguerite is wearing a corsage. The photo was most likely taken in Houston, Texas, where Marguerite and family lived from 1885 to 1910/15.

I also wonder what she is reading in the photo. Was it a prop or did she bring it with her? Though born in Germany, after 30 years living in the U.S., she could speak and read English. It looks a bit like a newsletter of some kind—perhaps of the Brunner Baptist Church she attended.

I imagine Marguerite as a strong but loving woman who confronted challenges in her life pragmatically. This is partly what I read into this photo but also knowing some pieces of her life story, and perhaps a bit of me reflecting myself. At age 24 Marguerite immigrated from Germany to the U.S., at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, then started a new life and family in Ohio. They later moved to Texas, where she lost her husband when she was 48, and at the beginning of an economic crisis in the U.S. Her youngest son was just 10. They managed: Marguerite owned their home and the older sons worked. Later, after her sons married, according to the 1910 census she worked as a sod keeper in the lodging industry (which I presume to mean that she rented out her land to farmers to graze their animals, but I haven’t explored this in detail). In her final years, she moved to live with her oldest son and his family in California.

Maybe all of our lives sound dramatic when reduced to tidbits and a few photos, looked back on a hundred years in the future. But even from this distance, her life also seems very relatable, and I wonder what things I am not seeing here. What do you see?