Our house has lots of dusty boxes that came from the houses of deceased family members. There’s the box of stuff from my father’s bachelor brother, William “Bud” Buzzell, who served on an LST during World War II and who sold me my first car for a dollar. There are several boxes from my mother’s mother, Thelma Jane MacLean, about whose Telluride parents I have written before.
Not to be outdone by my family’s packrat tendencies, we also have boxes from my husband Scott’s Inglis, Milne, Munroe, and MacCuish ancestors. The Inglis family hailed from Galashiels, south of Edinburgh; the Milnes were from Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. The Munroes left Scotland to settle in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We believe the MacCuishes emigrated from the island of North Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides to Newfoundland.
In one of Scott’s boxes, we found seventeen pages of photos taken probably about 1900 and pasted into a little album. The contents of the various boxes has been mixed up over the years, so we aren’t sure to which family the person who owned or took the photos belonged. The images depict what seem to be everyday scenes in a turn-of-the-century coastal (perhaps island?) community. By sharing them here, I hope you will enjoy them and that someone may be able to help identify where they were taken.
The photographer took the time to create the lovely panoramic view at the top of the page, which shows a cemetery in the lower right corner. Many of the buildings seen here are repeated in the other shots.
These two shots nearly create another panorama. In both, the same lighthouse is visible at the top of a far hill. I wonder if the photographer stood at the lighthouse to take the two shots for the previous panorama?
An unusual house with eight windows on one end appears at the left in this low-tide shot. Perhaps it still stands? Look closely; there is a woman sitting on the side of the boat to the right of the shack in front of stacks of arch-type lobster traps.
If only the photographer had moved his focus to the left, we would have had more of the sign that hangs over the door of the left-hand shack as a clue to the location of the photos! Note the man with his skiff on the beach.
This closer view of the village reveals a solitary bovine.
Does anyone recognize the shape of this small harbor? The white area on the horizon to the right of center is a sailing ship.
Perhaps people today still enjoy the view from this spot, as the couple here is doing.
Could this be the same woman reclining in front of the tree? The shape of the rocks forming the nearer point of land is somewhat memorable, at least in conjunction with the more distant point.
Certainly this unique rock formation has a name? Notice the small boat with four souls aboard to the right side of the photo.
