Researching Family Pictures / Lyakhovichi

Photos of Lyakhovichi Residents
and their Familiesby Deborah G. Glassman, copyright 2005

Copyrights of images retained by their owners, this is a protected publication not a release to the public domain. The Webmaster takes this opportunity to thank again all of the generous members of the Lyakhovichi Research Community who shared these valuable treasures!

All of the photographs collected over the decades since the start of this project are in a collection called Lyakhovichi Faces Images. Click on the image to read the information we have. If you have information, please share it with the webmaster and it will be added. Likewise if you have a photograph that is not in the album, please send it to the webmaster and it will be added.

There were several kinds of family pictures taken in this time period and they flowed across the ocean in two different directions. The ones that showed complete two-generation families (husband, wife, and children) were meant to be sent home to the parents of the emigrants. It was a small recompense for possibly never seeing the small children in these pictures grow, but they were cherished nevertheless. Families leaving the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s often still had these photos that had been held by their grandparents and an address last used in the 1920s, as their only clues to relatives in the United States.

There was another group of images that were designed to tug at the heart strings of husbands "gone ahead" from Russia to the United States. In addition to love and sentiment, the pictures were designed to make it hard for the husband to forget the families waiting patiently for their tickets to join him. The "bintel brief" letters in the "Forwart," as well as the posting of stern warnings by the rabbis of every community, demonstrate that while such abandonments were statistically at a low rate, they were real enough to strike fear into a waiting wife's heart. All of the pictures that do not include a husband in the grouping were of this second type.

A third kind has a different grouping. Here you see the multi-generational family, grandparents past middle age, young married couples, young children. These photos had another purpose. Many were taken during short visits and family reunions. Before the visitor would leave again, perhaps forever, a picture would be sent home with them.

So far the earliest Lyakhovichi photographer that we know is A. Brevda who photographed the Lifschitz family in Lyakhovichi in 1901. Turn your pictures over and see the photographer's mark and let us know what you find!

Another kind of portrait is the individual portrait of a paterfamilias or materfamilias - the male and female heads/center of the family. Taken so that a grandfather and grandmother would be as present in the households of their overseas children as the ones who remained nearby. Passed on with remonstrances about writing the yahrtzeit information on the picture at the appropriate time. They were a poor man's alternative to the oil paintings of the wealthy.

Reunion Photos

The 1920s saw families who had emigrated making trips home to visit, where financial resources allowed. Travel restrictions were much less under the Poles than they had been under Imperial Russia, and those visiting home were not going to find themselves jailed for emigrating, as they might have under the Russians. In 1923, Annie Deckston, a woman who had a vital role in the burgeoning Jewish community of Wellington New Zealand, came home to visit her family, including her brother Isaac Joseph Beder and his children. (Later, she would help her family and other Jewish children get out of Poland to New Zealand through the 1930s, right up until World War II.) Annie Deckston had probably come the farthest distance, but trips from the US to Lyakhovichi were not uncommon in this time period. These images and others that would show the already emigrated sitting next to relatives who had stayed behind, were sadder than others. There was always a strong sense that this would be the last time the family would be together. But start to consider the context of any photograph where you know that some of those included did not live nearby. Is there a school uniform present, a military uniform, a relative who has his town of settlement hyphenated in family conversation "that is Mendel-from-Minsk", that is "the Mishkin cousin from Kentucky."

There are also candids and studio portraits of "modern" professionals. Whether the subject was young lawyers in the 1910s or Polish soldiers in the 1930s, this group of photos shows confidence in the country's progress. It seemed a good time to be a Jewish lawyer in a Russia newly electing national parliaments (1912), and it seemed a good time to take pride in one's service to Poland in the 1930s. Pictures you can find elsewhere on our site of Jewish bank directors in the late 1920s, graduation pictures of eighteen year olds in the mid 1920s, et al, echo the same theme.

Between 1880 and 1920, thousands of Lyakhovichi Jews left the town. A move to even a nearby town could mean that an older relative might not be seen again before they died. The result of this viewpoint was that many older people "sat for portraits'' so that the young ones would have a picture to take along. Pictures were given before the young folk moved away and others were mailed to them soon after departure with heart-rending instructions like- "and when it's time, k'aynhora, write the yahrzeit right on the picture so you remember."

This is not the first generation that took pictures in our portion of Eastern Europe. Many pictures in museum and archival collections, evidence of the common practice of redoing old photographs taken decades earlier, and the copying of portraits taken with earlier technologies onto the latest card stocks. Images, originally on tintype and from all the 1840-1870 photographic technologies (ambrotypes and the even earlier daguerreotypes), were transferred in the 1860s and 70s to cartes de visite, a small photograph mounted on paper backings, and in the 1880s and 1890s, to cabinet cards, which were also the most popular for new pictures, dominating right into the 1920s. The cabinet cards were a great way to move pictures that one had only in limited numbers, or in antique forms, you could take a wet-plate negative and suddenly have multiple copies of what had been one-of-a-kind heirlooms. In the days when Jewish families rarely had less than six children grow to adulthood, the ability to duplicate these pictures must have been greatly valued. Cabinet cards also had less flaking than the earlier cartes de visite and the thicker card stocks with a high rag content meant they had longer endurance. The average buyer also appreciated the larger size of the cabinet cards, cartes de visite were named for the small cards that visitors would leave in a basket at your door, they reminded one of calling cards of diminutive size, rather than something reminiscent of a rich man's large oil portrait. Portrait photographers in Minsk Gubernia, announced in their advertising and on the backs of photos themselves, that they would happily make duplicates of your family heirlooms or make additional photos of the image your son sent from his far away school.

Dating Photographs

If pictures could be taken in any time period and moved to a long-lasting medium, how can you tell when they were taken? There are two ways to date photographs, from their content and from their characteristics. Content addresses issues like: the clothing worn; the attitudes assumed for the portrait; and what was the intent of the portrait. Characteristics speak of: the card stock on which the photo is mounted, the photographer's imprint, and the specific info of the photographic method. Even the earliest pictures preserved in wooden cases have distinctive traits. Is it reflective, does it float like a hologram? Then you are probably looking at a daguerreotype. Is it in a wooden case with a white gray photo background, but you can see it clearly from all angles? - then you may have an ambrotype. Does it appear as the description for an ambrotype, but it is magnetic? Then you have a tintype. Is it a modern looking photo on a white background under 3 inches in size, then it may be a carte de visite. These all have dates of common usage that can help you, just as discerning whether a picture was taken on a 1930s Brownie or a 1950s Polaroid will tell you information you need. When there is a conflict between content and characteristics – i.e. a person in clothing of the 1860s and a photographic technique of a later time, what we are probably looking at is a re-photographed image. Sometimes you can get a hint from the photo itself. You can see the outline of the brass daguerreotype frames in some of the re-copies of this time period. Or if you have evidence that the subject died in the 1880s and there is a 1902 date on the photograph, that was the year that more of the family wanted pictures of the deceased, clearly not the year the picture was taken. Pictures of an already deceased member of the family were popular for a kind of image called a “Crayon Portraits.” They look like pencil (in French, crayon) on canvas, but were actually photographic images. I have seen many from the Ukrainian gubernias and almost always the "new portrait" was created for a yahrtzeit of the deceased. They are large images on canvas, a quick photographic way to have a family heirloom of the zayda's picture.

The distinguishing feature of the cabinet cards, which eventually drove out the little cartes de visite as competition, was their larger size, on heavier cardstock, and they were even less expensive and less difficult to produce than the carte de visites, which in turn had bested their earlier competition with their relative less expensive means of production. It is card stock that makes the task of a historian working in the Russian Empire easier. Russian photographers bought their card stock from English merchants, almost exclusively, in an industry which replenished card stock every six months. The card was usually ornamented distinctively and can be dated by catalog or by manufacturer’s date printed on the card. I examined a large number of scanned photos for another project and found that of over 200 randomly selected images of Jews in the Russian Empire’s gubernias of today’s Ukraina, more than two thirds showed English company information on the backing papers. In the larger cities of Ukraine (Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, et al), the material was frequently "current stock," that is the dates of the paper and the date of usage was within 6 months of each other, though I would have expected that Russian photographers and merchants could reasonably have been sold stock from previous years, or not used it quickly. England dominated the market but did not own it exclusively. Materials were also shipped from the Netherlands and Germany.

Pictures taken in the earlier times were taken for the same reasons as those in the 1880s to the first decade of the 1900s - to preserve an image of an elderly relative for children moving away; to keep the portrait of an adult child embarking on a dangerous venture; and to aid in making matches for children no longer resident at home but whose parents wanted to arrange a match there. The first group, the pictures of venerated parents and grandparents, was packed up and taken to towns like Slutsk, Bialystok, Riga, Minsk, to accompany Lechovichers who settled in Russia's big cities. The second group, viewed nervously by the parents who received them, were of their newly adult children in Russian military uniforms; of their more fortunate children in far-away schools, and of their daring children who had reached a settlement in a foreign European country. The third, portraits of young women or young men, were often carried back to the party who had sent them, when they arrived to meet their potential marriage partner for the first time.

Photography was a studio event in both of those time periods 1840s-1870s and 1880s-1920s but costs dropped considerably between the two time periods. As the expense associated with photography came down, people who were only sufficiently monied to pay taxes, could now afford to buy photographs of their aged parents/grandparents, instead of such a purchase being the gift from well-established heads of families in their fifties and sixties. Anecdotal stories abound in this time period of older couples making the commitment to "sit for their portrait" after long importuning by their grown children. Lowered portrait costs meant that more people were photographed and lowered duplication costs meant that more photographs could be distributed among the typical households of eight or more grown children. Even in 1900, you see advertisements for photographers offering to convert and duplicate old pictures and to make more copies of pictures you had taken elsewhere!

This is the type of portrait that created a livelihood for itinerant photographers and booksellers in the first half of the nineteenth century - if the customer couldn't pay well, then take a picture of a subject that a lot of people will want to honor. If you sell books associated with famous rabbis, see if you can't also place a chronograph or lithograph or inexpensive reprint of an early photo. But this one was handed down in the family of the rabbi and it was used as the family's focus for all kinds of family gatherings and charitable events, as evidenced by its appearance on a 1920s pamphlet calling on the family to donate to a community cause in the name of their ancestor. It is also a good example of the kind of picture taken with the technology of one time period that was modified in the next twenty years to make it more accessible to the subsequent generation. The portrait was made in the 1860s or 1870s, Rabbi Alexandrovsky died in 1877. It was put onto canvas in the 1880s and real card stock probably before the turn of the century.

Lyakhovichi Jews began taking pictures outside the studio, somewhere before the year 1905. Candids include picnic scenes, political activists, book discussion groups and community theater participants. They show co-workers gathered around new machinery, or in a law library, or just taking advantage of a pretty day and a camera. That last type mentioned, was frequently turned into homemade picture postcards. Mr. Brevda, the photographer who had been taking Lyakhovichi pictures for a quarter century, wasted no time remonstrating with people who took their own. He advertised that he would mount their pictures on mailable cardstock and soon photos left Lyakhovichi with these scenes enclosed.

Alter Brevda began taking photographs sometime in the nineteenth century as a photographer assistant to an itinerant photographer. He eventually built a studio onto his father's building on Market Place (Bazarskaya) and put out display signs advertising his work. The signage was sufficiently prominent and attractive that when shortly before WWI, a group of young people wanted to start a theater group, they begged for Mr. Brevda to post the show notices here and he obliged. Others put up signs also, but this was the place where people were accustomed to stop and see new photo samples. Perhaps the display cases looked like these in this photo, generously shared with the permission of webmaster Jose Gutstein, from the Szczuczyn, Poland shtetl website.

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Last modified January 1, 2021
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