As I have noted, my second-great-grandfather, James Archer, married Harriet Bell in the 1850s and had two sons before the Civil War, Morgan and James. Then James fought in the war. He returned, and the couple had two more children, Lillian and Frederick. Lillian Archer married Edward Yates (b. c. 1850) in the early 1890s. After their first daughter died young, they had four children (F, M, M, F) between 1897 and 1908, living at 13 Maple Street in Binghamton, NY. The eldest surviving child was Gertrude, who became my maternal grandmother. But Edward Yates died in March 1911, coincidentally around the time that James Archer passed away.
Less than five months after Edward died, the widow Lillian Archer Yates married Maurice Holland, b. 1856. I know very little about him, except that he was likely Mexican, according to the 1920 Census, and that his native language was Spanish. The 1930 Census said he was from Texas, and that he spoke English.
In the 1940 census, he was an 85-year-old stationary engineer for a cold storage plant. He died in 1943, five years after Lillian, even though she was about a decade younger than he was.
How does that happen that a guy marries a widow with four children under 14 the same calendar year that her first husband died? I dunno.
Tintypes
The images came from the tintypes I found in my baby sister’s living room in Charlotte, NC, in May 2026. What’s that?
From Wikipedia: A tintype, also known as a melanotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal, colloquially called ‘tin’ (though not actually tin-coated), coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. It was introduced in 1853 by Adolphe Alexandre Martin in Paris…
“Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the 1930s, and it has been revived as a novelty and fine art form in the 21st century. It has been described as the first ‘truly democratic’ medium for mass portraiture.”
A photography studio created the before-and-after images of Lillian and Maurice.
