While working on Tom Schroeder's tribute, I purchased a small collection of very old Blocker and Lyden Studio photos on E-bay that were located in Minnesota.
I asked the seller if he knew where he purchased them and if he remembered the name of the estate sale. Unfortunately the only thing he could remember was he purchased them about 10 years, somewhere in Minnesota...and like usual there were NO names or information written on back of the pictures.

If you follow my web page features you'll see me warn people that their old photos and collections will end up just like this one from Minnesota someday - sold at auction, on e-bay, or simply thrown away. Many people scoff at the notion that their kids/grandkids will do this but having worked on Manning family history for nearly 50 years I have seen one collection after another get thrown away, and occasionally years later someone from that family will contact me to see if I have anything about their family - most of them never realizing someone in their family threw their original family photos away or sold them.

So this is why I'm constantly begging people to get their old family/Manning pictures to me so I can make high resolution scans of them and that way they'll get archived in my immense Manning historical database...YES I realize that some people have already scanned some/most of their collections, BUT from what I've seen over the decades is they didn't know what they were doing and made low resolution scans, crooked scans, plain and simple rotten quality scans that may be better than nothing but worthless if you want to show them in high resolution or make large prints.

Unfortunately the few old Manning/family collections that are still left out there will eventually meet their demise, with more of our Pioneer history lost FOREVER.

Now to have a good ending for once, besides me getting these pictures back home - as soon as I saw 2 of the photos I immediately recognized one that I already had scanned from a different collection years ago and the other picture I KNEW I recognized the face and came up with some possible family collections to search in.
I searched several of the possible family collections in my database and finally looked through the Karsten collection. I knew I would have to go through each folder of the Karsten scans and sure enough I found the one I knew I had already scanned - unfortunately it wasn't identified.


Scanned from the Bernice (Karsten) Schroeder collection in 2012

Scanned from the Minnesota collection
So then I started comparing some of the old Karsten family pictures and SURE enough, the other Minnesota picture I thought I recognized I could compare it to one that was identified in Bernice Schroeder's collection and it is of Wilken & Lena (Moeller) Karsten. SO BINGO, now I knew for sure this Minnesota collection is connected to the Manning Karsten family. A couple of other pictures might be younger/older images of Wilken & Lena, and they are guesses, BUT some of the other faces sure look like Karstens.
Now realize that I have hundreds of thousands of scans of pictures, documents, and other types of Manning/family history, so without that one picture I recognized from my scans of the Karsten collection 10 years ago, I would have probably been searching for days.

My first thought is the man in the Minnesota collection looks like my great-grandfather William Kusel who also had a full beard, but I knew this wasn't my great-grandmother Sophia (Grube) in the Minnesota collection, plus William's face was narrower (as seen in picture just below) than the man in the Minnesota collection.


William & Sophia (Grube) Kusel

Picture scanned from the Minnesota collection
Below you can see the same facial features of Wilken and Lena also look very similar in both pictures.
Unfortunately I don't have the children specifically identified...

Ten sons and daughters were born to Wilken & Lena Karsten.
Peter Karsten, a son, died January 3, 1909, aged 43 years.
Maggie, Mrs. William Opperman, Hannas, Mary, Mrs. Gustav Vinke, Claus, Henry, Katie, Mrs. Herman Rowedder, August, Emil, and Emma, Mrs. Walter Laurinat
Now whom do I go to who might be able to recognize some of the faces - Sadly the only one I could think of was Bernice (Karstens) Schroeder, whose collection I scanned in 2012...but she is deceased. There is another younger cousin, Bill Opperman, but he is too young to be able to recognize any of the people in the collection I purchased. The only chance now is if I can get Harold Schmidt's or Harry/Duane Karsten's collection to go through and scan - there may be some of these Minnesota Karsten pictures in their collections - Harold also being a Karsten descendent.

Now, ironically I'm working on Tom Schroeder's tribute so these pictures are fitting for his feature story - even though I don't know the exact connection/names for most of the Minnesota collection but I'm sure most of them are Karsten connected/related.

Here are the rest of the pictures from the Minnesota collection - hopefully a Karsten relative will come forward and help ID some of them.


5 siblings - Blocker Art Studio


Brother & sister - Lyden Studio


Couple - Gus Lyden Studio


Couple - Lyden Studio


Lady - Blocker Art Studio


Man & wife - Blocker Art Studio

I'm fairly sure this is an older time-frame of Man & wife just above - Blocker Art Studio

Even if we never identify the rest of the pictures - these are the Pioneers who came to this area, raised the WWI & WWII generation, all of whom gave us the "Bread Basket of the World" and the great community we live in today.