Young girl. Olivia Area, Calhoun County, Texas. Early 1900s.

Young girl, Olivia Area, Calhoun County, Texas, early 1900s.

Identification of the people and places in the Paulson photographs is often speculative.  Identification of the location of the Texas pictures was a matter of family history and luck.  Family history had related that Lillie Paulson had died in Olivia Texas (and thus made it likely that the picture of her grave was located there. )  This led me to search for records and pictures of Olivia and Calhoun County and to the interesting and informative 1919 book, Svenskarne i Texas, (and its 1994 English translation, and 2004 web version). There I found a number of photographs which included some of the very people that I found in my own photos. In fact, one of the pictures included in the 1919 book was a picture made from one of my  glass negatives.  Further search of church and census records for the Olivia colony area, and additional help from descendants of the Olivia families have allowed at least tentative identification of other individuals.

But there are still unidentified people in my pictures. Many of them occur repeatedly in different pictures.  I know that I am reading their names and histories in the records of the little Eden Church, and / or in the census records of Calhoun County. But which name belongs to this particular person? I suspect that I am seeing them in another picture - as an older or younger person. But is the familiar person - the same person  or a sister? mother? cousin? with a close resemblance.

This picture bears a close resemblance to the location of a picture in Svenskarne i Texas - a picture of members of the Damstrom family.  But is it the same day? the same location? There is no way to tell. And as for the young lady her identity is still in question.

Identifiers:

Negative: paulson280    (scanned as 1200 bpi tiff and converted to 400 bpi jpeg for posting here.)

Sources:

Severin, E., Scott, A. L., Westerberg, T. Julius., Ojerholm, J. Melcher. (1919). Svenskarne i Texas i ord och bild, 1838-1918. [Austin, Tex.: E. L. Steck. (Accessible fulltext through the Hathi Trust Digital library: here)

      English Translation:    ”Swedes in Texas in Words and Pictures, 1838 to 1918”  translated by Christine Andreason, 1994: and accessed on the web  here.

Swedish American Online Website:  Damstrom family picture and the English version of "Swedes in Texas."