New Brubaker Family photo from 2009.058 collection.
In April 2012, we shared a few photos of Colorado Dentist William Oliver Brubaker that had made its way into our collection via a bunch of family photos (see the post here.) As luck would have it, Mr. Brubaker returned this past week in a collection of materials our volunteer Doug was processing. This new find indicates deeper connections with the Mid-Willamette Valley for Mr. Brubaker, and may provide much needed clues to uncovering the mysterious owners of this new collection.
To get the full scope of how exciting this find is, we have to go back a few years to 2009 when an olive green plastic file box was delivered to the Marion County Historical Society. The donor had acquired the materials from her sister, who had found the photos in the basement of the “Liberty Apartments” in the 1940s. The finder of the photos had unsuccessfully searched for the original owners of the photographs. The photos are a wonderful mix of tin types, carte de visite, studio portraits and snapshots, and many have Salem photographers listed. A few have even been marked on the back with the names of individuals pictured. One such marked photo was a near duplicated to our William Oliver Brubaker photo. As Doug continued to look he found the family photo above, which is labeled with the Brubaker family names and shows a much younger William Oliver Brubaker.
As luck would have it as well, our last blog post on William Oliver Brubaker got is in touch with a researcher across the country doing work on this family. They were able to help us use the names given on the back (which use titles like “Aunt Jane”) to help identify the individuals shown as William A. (far left) and Jane Oliver Brubaker (far right) and their children.
So we have one more clue to finding the mysterious owners of the photos. The search narrows to individuals that may have called Jane Oliver Brubaker, “Aunt Jane.” If we can find the family name, we may also be able to identify other images in the collection through cross referencing known images. It is all very exciting.
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