I went looking for a particular picture of my wife’s grandmother today.  I did’t find it but I did run across a couple of neat old tintypes.

Tintypes were an early form of photograph made by creating a direct positive image on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the  photographic emulsion.  Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century.

My tintypes are 2 1/2″ X 3 1/2″ and .010″ thick.  I believe they were made around 1890 and they look pretty good for being 127 years old

I sometime see old pictures like these in antique malls and I think it’s a shame because they were probably discarded just because no one knew who the subjects were.  Fortunately, someone taped a label to the back of one of mine identifying the subjects (the handwriting looks like Aunt Ann’s).

So apparently, the two ladies are my Gr-Gr-Aunts Barbara Roth Hopf and Mary Roth Fleischman.  I never knew either of them.  But the little child is my Gr-Aunt Elizabeth Rauch, better know to me and Keith as “Aunt Lizzy”.  We saw a lot of her when we were growing up in California, of course, she looked a lot older then.  She was also one of the little girls sitting in front of the wagon at the Rauch Family Picnic which I posted about earlier.

The second picture falls more towards the unknown category.  I can make a good guess about one of the gentlemen though.
If you look at the background carefully it is easy to assume that the two pictures were taken on the same day in the same place.
If we also assume that all of the subjects are related, then two of the men are probably the ladies’ husbands, Andrew Hopf and Bernhard Fleischman.  The third man would be George Rauch, the little girl’s father.
By comparing this to other pictures I have of George Rauch, including the one from the Rauch Family Picnic, I am ready to say that the man in the middle is George Rauch (1860-1932).  He was Aunt Lizzy’s father and my Gr-Gr-Grandfather.