Genealogy has taken me into some strange records over the years.
This one may win.
Several years ago, I was working on my own Logan family when I ran across a story about my first cousin three times removed, John Logan.
John died of typhoid fever in 1878.
That alone wasn’t particularly unusual. Typhoid was a serious and often deadly disease in nineteenth-century America.
What happened after John was buried was considerably more unusual.
His mother wanted his photograph.
So his father had him dug back up.
Yes. Really.
John Logan
John was only sixteen when he died in Warren, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Stephen Logan, my second great-granduncle.
John was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville, where the Logan family owned a cemetery lot.
According to an account published almost a century later in The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, John’s mother was deeply distressed that she had no photograph of her son.
Eventually, Stephen Logan traveled to Titusville and arranged to have John’s body exhumed.
And that’s where photographer John A. Mather entered the story.
The Photographer of Pennsylvania’s Oil Country
Mather wasn’t an obscure photographer.
Born in England in 1829, John Aked Mather came to the United States in 1856 and settled in Titusville in 1860, just as Pennsylvania’s oil industry was exploding.
He began photographing it.
Oil wells, workers, buildings, machinery, towns, and landscapes all passed before Mather’s camera. His photographs eventually became an important visual record of the early Pennsylvania petroleum industry.
The Drake Well Museum later acquired thousands of his surviving glass negatives. Thousands more had been destroyed during the devastating Oil Creek flood and fire of 1892.
But in December 1878, Mather received a very different assignment.
He was asked to photograph John Logan.
He had already been buried for several months.
One Last Photograph
According to Miller and Stratton’s 1972 account, John’s coffin was exhumed and positioned upright near a hitching rail.
Mather and his assistant, A. B. Rockwood, prepared the camera.
The upper portion of the coffin lid was removed.
And Mather made two exposures of sixteen-year-old John Logan.
The authors described the photographs as having turned out exceptionally well.
That sentence stopped me cold when I first found it.
Because somewhere, at least in 1878, there were two photographs of John Logan taken months after his death.
Which immediately gave me another genealogy problem.
Where are they now?
I don’t know.
And you know perfectly well I’m not going to be able to leave that alone.
Post-Mortem Photography Wasn’t as Strange Then as It Sounds Now
Photographing the dead during the nineteenth century wasn’t unheard of.
Photography gave families something earlier generations often couldn’t have: an accurate image of someone they loved.
For families who had never had a portrait made during a person’s lifetime, a post-mortem photograph might be their only opportunity to preserve that face.
That doesn’t make John’s case ordinary.
He had already been buried.
His mother’s desire for an image of her son was apparently strong enough that the family went through the extraordinary process of having him exhumed months later and hiring a professional photographer.
Seen through twenty-first-century eyes, it sounds macabre.
Seen as the actions of parents who had lost their sixteen-year-old son and possessed no photograph of him, it looks different.
Still unusual.
But also terribly sad.
A Genealogy Find I Never Expected
This is one reason I keep reading beyond birth certificates, census records, and obituaries.
If I had researched John only far enough to fill in the boxes on a family tree, I would have had something like:
John Logan
Born about 1862
Died 1878, age sixteen
Buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Titusville, Pennsylvania
Accurate.
And completely inadequate.
A historical journal published nearly a century after John’s death gave me something no vital record could.
It told me that his mother grieved because she had no photograph of her son.
It told me that his father tried to remedy that.
It gave me the name of the photographer.
It even told me that two photographs were taken.
Suddenly John wasn’t simply a sixteen-year-old who died of typhoid.
He was someone’s child.
And 148 years later, someone in his extended family is still looking for his picture.
And Yes, I’m Going to Look for It
Mather’s surviving photographic collection makes this particularly tempting.
The Drake Well Museum preserves thousands of his surviving negatives and photographs.
Whether either of the two John Logan photographs survived, I don’t yet know.
They may have remained with the Logan family.
They may have been lost.
They may have been among the thousands of Mather negatives destroyed in the 1892 flood and fire.
Or one could be sitting in a collection somewhere under a description that nobody has connected to sixteen-year-old John Logan.
That’s enough possibility for this genealogist.
So this Halloween, while everyone else is telling ghost stories, I’ll leave you with a true Logan family story.
In December 1878, Stephen Logan had his sixteen-year-old son’s coffin exhumed from a Pennsylvania cemetery because John’s grieving mother wanted something she did not have.
A photograph of her boy.
And John A. Mather took two.
Now I want to find them.
Update: The Search for Johnโs Photograph
After scheduling this story, I contacted Drake Well Museum & Park to ask whether either of John A. Mather’s photographs of John Logan might have survived.
Sarah Ann Bell, curator at the museum, conducted an extensive search of the Mather collection but found neither glass-plate negative. Mather reportedly had approximately 20,000 glass-plate negatives before the devastating 1892 fire and flood, after which fewer than 5,000 survived. About 4,400 surviving negatives were eventually donated to the museum by Mather’s daughter. John’s two photographs are not among them.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the images are gone forever. A print could have survived with the Logan family or in another collection, but for now, the original negatives appear not to have survived in the known Mather collection.
Sarah also tracked down something equally valuable: the source behind the story itself.
Ernest C. Miller cited an unpublished manuscript by Edgar Taft Stevenson, a former editor of the Titusville Herald. According to Miller’s footnote, Stevenson collected the information from old-time residents in 1930. The manuscript was later owned by his son, James B. Stevenson.
That gives the story a clearer paper trail, although it is important to remember that Stevenson was collecting these recollections more than fifty years after John’s death in 1878. My next search is for Stevenson’s original manuscript or any related research material that may have survived in another Pennsylvania repository.
And Sarah uncovered one more family connection I hadn’t expected. John’s maternal grandfather, Jonathan Locke, was a blacksmith in early Titusville during the beginnings of the petroleum industry. His shop stood on property that is now part of Drake Well Museum & Park.
So my search for one missing photograph has managed to circle John’s family right back to Drake Well.
The photographs haven’t been found. But the search certainly wasn’t a dead end.
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