A Photo Of Gilbert Ford Kinney

Now that I've met my wonderful cousin, Abbott Hart Hall, and looked at some pictures of her father, it strikes me that this picture may be her father, Gilbert Ford Kinney (1907-2000).

Okay, that's not too clear. Here's a closeup of the face with the brightness and contrast adjusted:

Now for a digression on family archeology. When I started trying to make sense out of stuff that was lying around my mother's house, I had a bow of 35mm slides. There was almost no organization, just a jumble of slides in a dusty box. I bought a slide scanner to digitize them, but I needed to organize them somehow.

It appears that most of the vacation photos cover about 1948 through 1953. Your corrections are always welcome.

I started by sorting the slides into groups based upon the cardboard mountings and how they were marked. E.g., some say Kodachrome in red, some Ektachrome in yellow, and so on. The I tried to distinguish them by the way the stamped numbers looked: some faint, some darker, some red, etc. Once I had them in groups, I tried to group them by the original roll. I tried to pick one of each sequence number. I tried to guess by the subject of the photo.

In the case of this photo, it's stamped 11, and I had it grouped with a number 12 that shows the Arkansas State Capitol. Some of the rolls of film seem to represent trips my grandmother Aline took with her husband Brooks, so the supposition would be this was taken in Arkansas. However, that would make it more likely that this is Gilbert's brother Abbott, and my eyes say it really looks more like Gilbert.

So I just went back to the actual slides and look again and the stamping of the 11 and 12 seem different. I find other slides that are indicative of a trip north in California: cypress trees as in Monterey, and Morro Rock.

This is real-time investigation, I look and add these to this posting. This one is sequence number 12 and it appears to be the same guy on the right. Here's another one with my grandmother this time: Here's another that seems to be in front of the same house. If the man is Gilbert F Kinney, perhaps this boy is his son, Gilbert "Butch" Jr?

For some perspective, here's a photo of Gilbert on the left, with hs mother Mabel, brother, Abbott, and father Earle, taken in the 1930s: (The pictures are clickable and will take you to the flickr page where you can see them in more detail.)

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