It is July, and here in Georgia, it is hot, hot, hot, but I have some cool news for this first Tuesday in July.

Image from page 246 of “Georgia, historical and industrial” (1901); Internet Archive Book Images, Flickr

To begin, I have posted a July 2016 update to my Checklist of Early Georgia Photographers, 1841-61  Each time I think I will not find, or hear of, a new Georgia photographer working before 1861, I do!

Two completely new entries in my update, each of whom advertised in the town of Oglethorpe in May 1851, are new-to-me daguerreotypists Philip T. Fears, and W. C. Padilla. These names were shared with me by a colleague doing research using that town’s earliest newspaper.

Two entries to the Checklist, both artist- daguerreotypists, have had a make-over: J. Atwood (and J. Atwood & Son), and J. H. Mifflin. Other entries that have had a touch up here and there include Bells’s Daguerreian Gallery, William Hunt, George J. Smith (and The People’s Gallery), John A. Malambre, and J. Pleasant Prophitt.

All new and updated Checklist entries are in BLUE text, which will be changed into black text when I update next, in four to six months.

I learned recently that The International Directory of Photo Historians is now located on the Classy Arts website. This site supersedes the old directory called PhotoHistorians, founded by William Allen in 1986. This new global Directory is completely revised. I have reentered my information and it is now up to date. You might check the Directory out if you have an interest in photographers who worked in another area of the country or world.

I have noted the Classy Arts site before as a source of information on how to research photographers. See it also for information on Dating Photographs, Photohistory, sources for Public Domain Images, and its growing list of photographer biographies.

Sunflowers. Photo by Bruce Fritz, n.d.; image Number K5752-2, United States Dept of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=23559

Julie Melby, the Graphic Arts Curator in the Rare Books and Special Collections department at Princeton University, has compiled an index to the original photography in The Philadelphia Photographer, as part of her research on that journal’s founder and editor, Edward L. Wilson.

There are two indexes, one by photographer name, and one by the date the photograph was published. The Philadelphia Photographer was retitled Wilson’s Photographic Magazine in 1889. These indexes cover both titles and begin with the first issue, January 1864, and end in 1901, when the journal’s photographs were replaced by halftones.

During this period:

540 prints by 280 photographers from 142 cities in 16 countries were published.Within the United States alone, negatives were sent by photographers in 33 different states, remarkable given there were only 36 states in 1864 and 44 by 1890.

Many photographs published here were attributed to recognized names in photography (Jeremiah Gurney, William H. Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Napoleon Sarony, and others). In addition, photographs by lessor known photographers in the United States and elsewhere were published, including the photographic work of 280 women.

I found that there are four photographs listed in this Index made by Atlanta (and Athens) photographer C. W. [Columbus Washington] Motes [1837-1910]. In the near future I will do a thorough check of the Index for other photographers who worked in Georgia.

News about Newspapers 

Vickie Betts’ Southern Home Front Online Collection has moved to a new web address. This site references newspapers from across the south (Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, etc.).

Betts, a researcher and librarian at the University of Texas at Tyler, has worked on this index for many years; it is a fine source often overlooked. I discussed this source in a January 2014 post called Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes Off-the-Beaten-Path.

My thanks to historian Andy Hall who posted this information from Betts on his blog  Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.

Kenneth Marks, of The Ancestor Hunt made updates and additions to U.S., Canadian, and other newspapers in June 2016. As of that update, there were approximately 17,500 links to free newspapers in his lists of North American newspapers, which of course includes Georgia

The Digital Library of Georgia folks tell me that the Macon newspapers will be converted for use by any operating system later this month – keep your fingers crossed! They also tell me that the Columbus newspaper site is is on schedule to be converted by mid-fall. Hooray!

Michael Gagnon, an Associate Professor of History at Georgia Gwinnett College, has compiled a list of links for historical newspapers that he recently shared. He highlights those publications from Georgia and the South. I am really happy to know about his list which includes some newspapers with which I was unfamiliar.  I learned about this list from Robert S. (Bob) Davis, a professor at Wallace State, Alabama.

Gagnon also includes a link to The Missionary Herald (Boston) 1806-1861, on Google books. This publication is from the American Foreign Missions Board of the Congregationalist Church.

Speaking of churches, I do not know where I got this link to the Southern Cross Newspaper Archive, based in Savannah, GA, but I thank the unknown source. This publication originally served the Catholic Diocese of both Atlanta and Savannah. The Newspaper Archives includes issues 1920-1960. For a search using the word photographer, there were 62 hits.

Photo by Russell Lee, Sunflower heads in field, Southeast New Madrid County, Missouri Farms. May, 1938, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, (accessed July 04, 2016) https://www.loc.gov/item/fsa1997023236/PP

News related to Researching Photographers Working in the South:

The Northeast Arkansas Regional Archives now has the negatives of award-winning photojournalist Barney Sellers (d. 2012). Sellers photographed Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. presidents, among others. The collection is in located in Powhatan, Arkansas.

The Birmingham Public Library includes sources of use to those of us researching photographers. They list links to a database and bibliography for Alabama Inventors and patents, 1821 – 2016, and an obituary index to Birmingham area newspapers, 1918-1996.

You can explore the photographs of the Fort Bend County (Texas) Libraries on the Portal to Texas History. Many photographers of these images are unidentified, but named photographers include Louis Vogelsang, George Wingate, Bud Longserre, and Houston  Schlueter.

The National World War II Museum, located in New Orleans, is definitely worth the trip. The Museum now has a large number of photographs available online. Here is a list of images which result by using the  search term Georgia.

Use of these images does come with a price, which begins at the low of $7.00 for personal use and private study. If I wanted to post one of their images here on Hunting and Gathering, I would be charged $60.00.  Of course at that price, I would not do it.

Many of these images are in the public domain, and the Museum knows and states that. For example, dozens were made by the Signal Corps, a government agency. Some of the same images may be available from the National Archives or from the Library of Congress, for free or at less cost.

I completely understand the World War II Museum’s need to make a profit in order to to support their work. Their statement:

Digitization of images is a costly process. These fees help to offset the cost of the technology involved in digitization process, the storage of large, digital files and the preservation of the original photographs, as well as staff time.

I have been a dues paying member of theirs for the last several years, and as far as I know, there is no price-break for members.

Remember, there are many sources outside the South for Georgia, and other southern images!

Chapman-Harrison Motor Company, Macon, Georgia. Card. 1930. Digital Commonwealth, http://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/w3763h37x (accessed July 04, 2016).

The Digital Commonwealth, Massachusetts Collection Online, has 584 postcards taken in Georgia. The postcards are from the Boston Public Library’s Tichnor Brothers Collection. The images are of aerial views, lakes, motor courts, blooming plants, airports, restaurants, buildings, and more. These postcards can be accessed by topic, place, or date.

I hope at least one of these cool news bites was a hot tip for you. If you are going on the road, working from home, or doing your research in an archives or library this summer, try to keep cool, you need a clear head for your hunting and gathering!

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without  written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.