The 19th-Century Family Found in an Attic

Most portraits of unidentified subjects retain that status in perpetuity—a curatorial reality explored in HNOC’s 2024 exhibition Unknown Sitters. In this case, however, working on the assumption that the sitters were former residents of 819 Elmira Avenue, HNOC staff struck gold.

We checked census records and found a family of six occupying the house in 1930: Benjamin Franklin Williams; his wife, Perneler Margaret Butler Williams; their three children: Reginald (age 15), Carroll (11), and Zyrda (4); and Perneler’s mother, Mary Jones. We then cast our sights further back in time—to the 1880s, and the arrival of Mary Jones and her husband, Grandison Jones, on Elmira Street. 

On April 2, 1883, the Jones family purchased the property that would remain home to their descendants for 135 years. The family history, pieced together from numerous sources, spans epochs. Grandison was likely born enslaved between 1850 and 1856. By 1870 he was living on the West Bank and serving as a special deputy marshal for the 15th Ward of New Orleans. He appears consistently in public records as a laborer and in at least one instance as a laborer on a transfer boat.  

According to the 1870 census, Grandison shared an Algiers home with his 85-year-old father, Arnold Jones, a native of Maryland and a laborer; his likely mother, Elizabeth, aged 68, also born in Maryland; and other relatives. By the 1900 census, Grandison and Mary (known to her family members as Mollie) had adopted a young daughter, Perneler. With the information currently at hand, HNOC believes that Grandison, Mary, and Perneler are the subjects of three of the crayon enlargements. The tintype is likely to be a young Grandison, given the popularity of that medium during his youth.  

Grandison died on Elmira Street on November 16, 1918. Mary also died in the house, on August 4, 1935. Subsequent generations were very active in the Second Good Hope Baptist Church, located diagonally across from the family home. One of Grandison and Mary’s granddaughters, Zyrda Williams Raphael—a graduate of Xavier University who lived in the house until she died in 1969—worked as a registered nurse and served as church secretary and Sunday school secretary at Second Good Hope. The house remained in the Raphael family until 2019. 

The human story told by these family portraits is remarkable—but the acquisition also expands HNOC’s documentation of historic photographic processes. To create a crayon enlargement, the negative is projected onto a large piece of light-sensitive paper, thus creating a photographic print. Pastel, chalk, or Conté crayon is then applied by hand over the image to reduce the appearance of flaws from the original negative and enhance details in the face and clothing. Crayon enlargements enjoyed a heyday in the post–Civil War decades but were still being made in the early 20th century. Tintypes, popular in the late 1850s and into the 1860s, are direct positives: unique, one-of-a-kind images. They are created directly on a metal plate that has been coated with light-sensitive materials and exposed in the camera. 

Discovered in a sealed attic space, the portraits had experienced fluctuations in heat and humidity over the years—but remained in very good shape, considering the circumstances. They have undergone conservation treatment to stabilize the images and are now available for researchers to view in our online catalog.