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.
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.
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.
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.