Sometimes a mystery waits quietly for years before enough pieces come together to suggest an answer.
While reviewing old family research and photos, I came across a digital copy of a small, gilded portrait photo sent to me about fifteen years ago. The woman in the photograph was believed to be Ellen Eastwood, my second great-grandmother.
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| Ellen Eastwood as a young woman |
The image appeared to be an ambrotype, an early photographic process popular from the mid-1850s into the early 1860s in which the image is mounted on glass in a protective cover. The photograph was preserved in an ornate gold-colored mat and frame typical of the period.
The young woman had center-parted hair, long side curls, a broad white collar, fitted front-buttoned bodice, and full sleeves narrowing at the wrists. Based on the clothing, hairstyle, photographic process, and case design, the portrait was probably made sometime between about 1855 and 1862.
The woman appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. Ellen Eastwood was born in 1837; she would have been nineteen in 1855 and twenty six in 1862. And so, the apparent age of the sitter fits Ellen quite well.
We also had a known photograph of Ellen taken around 1888-1895 in Fall River. Although comparing faces in photographs taken decades apart cannot establish an identification, several features appeared reasonably consistent: the general shape of the face, the eyes, the spacing between the eyes, the nose, and the set of the mouth. Aging, expression, lighting, photographic methods, and the angle of the head make such comparisons difficult, so this resemblance should be treated as supporting evidence rather than proof.
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| Ellen Eastwood (1837-1900) Gay's Studio, Fall River |
Still, the possibility that the young woman was Ellen seemed convincing—especially once two companion portraits came to light.
Two Young Men in Matching Frames
Another portrait in the same digital photo group sent by a relative was also an ambrotype - a young man wearing a dark, broad-lapeled waistcoat, a high collared white shirt, and an unusually large bow tie. He appeared to be in his early twenties. His hair, clothing, and the style of the photograph suggested approximately the same period as the woman’s portrait.
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| Eastwood Eastwood as a young man |
The two photographs were also nearly the same size and were mounted in similarly ornate gilded mats. That suggested they may have been commissioned at about the same time, perhaps by members of the same family.
The young man’s identity was unknown, but Ellen had two brothers who were living in or near Fall River during this period: Benjamin Eastwood, born in 1826, and Eastwood Eastwood, born in 1834.
Of these options, the younger brother, Eastwood Eastwood, 24 years old when he arrived from England, would be the more likely candidate.
At this point, I recalled I had a small gold framed portrait in glass of an unidentified young man dressed in clothing from the same period somewhere in my office.
Benjamin Simpson Eastwood as a young man
This third ambrotype showed another young man, dressed in much the same fashion. He wore a dark coat, white shirt, and bow tie, but he had a small beard beneath his chin and appeared older than the clean-shaven man in the first portrait. The lines around his eyes gave him a more mature appearance.
We now had a group of three unidentified ambrotypes:
- one young woman
- one younger-looking, clean-shaven man
- and one somewhat older man with a chin beard
All three photographs came down through the same family. They were similar in size, format, and presentation, and all appeared to date from the late 1850s or very early 1860s. The Eastwood family had three adult children in Massachusetts at precisely that time: Benjamin, Eastwood, and Ellen.
The most plausible interpretation is that the portraits show the three Eastwood siblings. If so, the younger, clean-shaven man would probably be Eastwood Eastwood, born in 1834, while the older man with the chin beard would be Benjamin Eastwood, born in 1826.
This identification cannot be proven from facial appearance alone. The case rests on the combined circumstances: family provenance, matching photographic formats, compatible dates, the apparent ages of the sitters, and the fact that the Eastwood family consisted of two adult sons and one adult daughter living in Massachusetts.
John Eastwood and Jane Simpson of Burnley, Lancashire, England
3rd great-grandfather John Eastwood and great-grandmother Jane Simpson were born, raised, married, and had children in Burnley, civil parish of Clitheroe, county of Lancashire, England. Patty and I passed 35 miles to the north when we walked through Kirkby Stephen on the Coast to Coast trail. Little did we know.
John Eastwood, 1798-1864
The surname Eastwood is Anglo-Saxon in origin and associated particularly with Lancashire and other parts of neighboring England. It originally described someone who lived near or came from an “east wood.”
John Eastwood, born September 12, 1798, Burnley, Lancashire, was the son of John Eastwood (1767-1838) and Anne Salmon (1769-1848), both from Burnley. Jane was christened December 25, 1976 in Pediham, about three miles west of Burnley. Her parents were Benjamin Simpson and Mary Ann Schofield.
John married Jane Simpson on January 22, 1819, at St. James Church in nearby Haslingdon, Lancashire.
The family lived in the Burnley area, about 20 miles north of Manchester and a center of textile printing in the 19th century. Burnley had been a market town since medieval times, holding a market for 700 years.
The town has survived ups and downs, but in 2013 Burnley was given an Enterprising Britain award from the UK Government for being the 'Most Enterprising Area in the UK’. From a thriving medieval market and cotton mill town, Burnley has morphed into a digital town, named one of England’s top tech towns by Financial Times.
In the 1851 census, John, 53, and Jane, 55, were living in Burnley with head-of-household Thomas, 31, Eastwood, 16, Ellen, 10, and Benjamin 4. This young Benjamin was perhaps a son of Thomas.
Crossing the Atlantic
John and Jane Eastwood and their nineteen year-old daughter, Ellen, sailed from Liverpool aboard the packet ship Chatsworth, captained by J. Gorham, and arrived at Boston on December 22,1855, after a winter Atlantic crossing of approximately six weeks. The Chatsworth was a three-masted, square-rigged vessel that regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route carrying mail “packets,” cargo, and passengers who slept in steerage.
Although a few tiny cabins might be available for wealthy passengers, poorer immigrants were in crowded, dark, damp, foul smelling steerage. Rats and disease were common problems.
From the October, 15, 1851 New York Daily:
“Each passenger from Liverpool receives weekly 5 lbs. of oatmeal, 2 1/2 lbs. biscuit, 1 lb. flour, 2 lbs. rice, 1/2 lb. sugar, 1/2 lb. molasses, and 2 ounces of tea. He is obliged to cook it the best way he can in a cook shop 12 feet by 6! This is the cause of so many quarrels and many a poor woman with her children can get but one meal done, and sometimes they get nothing warm for days and nights when a gale of wind is blowing and the sea is mountains high and breaking over the ship in all directions.
An Artisan Master Block Printer
John was a master calico block printer, a skilled textile worker who stamped colored patterns onto cotton cloth by hand using carved wooden blocks and wooden mallets. As an artisan with highly specialized knowledge, John would have been a sought after worker in Fall River, a major hub of the textile industry in the 19th century. Color block printing launched the city’s calico printing industry in the 1820s before mechanized cylinder printing largely replaced it.
At a sailing age of 57, was he recruited by a Fall River textile mill, or did he have a reason to leave England? One son was already here, but they must have left behind other family.
Our Borden family drove the rise of Fall River to be a premier 19th-century cotton-textile manufacturing center of the world. John possibly worked for the American Print Works, a giant textile printing giant along the Fall River waterfront founded by Holden Borden in 1835. He brought highly specialized knowledge of dye mixing and alignment chemistry that American mills desperately needed. At present, though, we have no employment record linking John directly to a company.
Living and working in Fall River during the mid-1800s placed John in the midst of a massive industrial shift. Manual block printing was highly respected but slow. As automated copper-cylinder machines took over the mills to churn out thousands of yards of fabric a day, hand-block printers like Eastwood either transitioned into color mixing, became roller-engravers, or were kept on exclusively for high-end, short-run luxury fabrics that machines could not replicate.
In 1867, three years after John’s death, a disastrous fire destroyed much of the American Print Works. The original 1835 manufacturing complex completely burned down, causing heavy uninsured financial losses that ultimately contributed to the firm's failure and reorganization into the American Printing Company in 1880.
Life in Fall River
By 1860, John, 62, Jane, 65, Eastwood, 25, Eastwood’s wife, Sarah, and the young couple’s three year-old daughter, Sarah, were living in the same household along the southwestern waterfront district of Fall River where dense worker housing and tenements were rapidly constructed to support the manufacturing boon in the city. Their personal estate was valued at just $50. They had been poor in England, and remained poor in America.
Jane died in December 1960, age 65, with cause of death listed as chronic diarrhea for 7 years. John died a little more than three years later on 24 February 1864; age 66, cause of death apoplexy.
Even with the short span they were in America, their decision to emigrate changed the future of the family.
The Eastwood Children
All of the couple’s children were born in Burnley, England. We know a son Thomas was born in 1820, but there are gaps in birth years in which other children may have been born. Only 19 year-old Ellen accompanied the parents across the Atlantic, but Benjamin preceded them and Eastwood came on his own later.
Benjamin Eastwood, 1826-1899
Benjamin Simpson Eastwood was born in Burnley on October 1, 1826. He was the oldest of the three siblings we believe may be represented in the gilded photographs.
In 1848, at the age of twenty-two Benjamin married Ann Nicholson in London. Ann, a thirty-six-year-old widow, was fourteen years his senior and had four children from her previous marriage. She and Benjamin had three more children together, Benjamin Simpson Eastwood, Jr., and twins Julia and James Sterling.
Ann died in Brompton, Kent, in 1852, only three months after giving birth to the twins. leaving Benjamin a widower with a young son and four stepchildren. Within the four years since his marriage, Benjamin had become a father or stepfather to seven children, and now a widower.
Six months after Ann’s death, Benjamin left London aboard the American Eagle. Traveling with him were his three year-old son and his three stepdaughters, Elizabeth, 15, Emily, 13, and Mary Ann, 11. They arrived at the port of New York on June 13, 1853. The ship’s manifest lists his profession as clergyman.
Ann’s oldest son, already adult, remained in England. The infant twins were not on the ship’s manifest, but were nevertheless with the family in 1855 when they were recorded in the Massachusetts state census. How they got across the Atlantic is another mystery.
Within two months of his arrival, Benjamin married Lucrelia Miner (1829-1922) in Dennis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He ministered in the area as a Methodist circuit rider. Benjamin and Lucretia had two daughters: Carrie, who died in infancy, and Nellie.
During his years on Cape Cod, Benjamin became interested the local agriculture and used his observations to write and publish The Cranberry and Its Culture, 1856, regarded as the first book on the commercial cultivation of cranberries, This young man must had had indefatigable energy.
By 1860, Benjamin and his family had moved on the Williamsburg, a hill town in the Hampshire foothills of western Massachusetts. They subsequently moved to Connecticut, where Benjamin attended the Berkeley School of Divinity in Middletown. Founded in 1854, Berkeley was an Episcopal seminary that later became associated with Yale. Benjamin’s ordination in the Episcopal church in 1863 marked an important transition from Methodist circuit rider.
Benjamin served as the rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington from 1869-1873. During these years his 18 year-old daughter, Julia, died with tuberculosis.
In 1872, Benjamin became rector of the newly organized Church of the Good Shepherd in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He remained associated with the parish for approximately twenty-five years and was named rector emeritus in 1898
Benjamin died in 1899 in Pawtucket of a cerebral hemorrhage. His death notice described him as one of the best-known Episcopal clergymen in New England.
He was buried in High Street Cemetery in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, alongside his first wife, Ann, and daughter, Julia.
His life had taken him from industrial Lancashire to London, Cape Cod, western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a prestigious rectorship in the Episcopal church. Along the way he cared for a large and complicated family, suffered the loss of a wife and two children, and wrote a pioneering book on cranberry cultivation.
Eastwood Eastwood, 1834-1900
Eastwood was born in Burnley, Lancashire in 1834. In England, Eastwood worked in the metal trades as a tinner and brazier.
Eastwood married Jane Elliott in Lancashire in 1856, and the following year sailed for Boston aboard the ship R. Robinson from Liverpool. Jane remained behind, either pregnant or with a new infant, and joined him later.
By 1860, Eastwood and Jane were in Fall River with their three year-old daughter, Sarah. Eastwood was working as a dinner and brazier. The young family was living in his parents’ household, together with Ellen.
Ellen married and left the household and his mother Jane died, both in 1860. His father John died within another four years, leaving Eastwood with no family attachments in Fall River other than his married sister.
Eastwood moved to Smithfield, Rhode Island to find work as a tinsmith at Robert Plews, a large company with a global market that made patented tin cylinders.
Forty two year-old Jane died with rectal cancer in 1870, leaving Eastman a widower with a 13 year-old daughter.
The following year, Eastwood married the boss’s daughter, Sarah Gosling Rowse, a widow who also had a young daughter, Maud. Together, they had another child, Thomas, who died in infancy. Sarah’s father, a prominent manufacturer, took Eastman into business as a partner and Eastman eventually became president of R. Plews,
Politically active, Eastman served on the town council, as an alderman, in the Rhode Island General Assembly (1893-1895) as a Republican, and eventually as mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island. He was a thirty second degree Mason, and belonged to a number of secret societies.
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| Eastwood Eastwood From the Internet |
Unfortunately, Eastwood was diabetic and, soon after his re-election as Mayor, surgery on a corn resulted in gangrene and blood poisoning. He died at home in 1900, age 66. His death was noted in many newspapers, making headlines in the Providence Journal:
"Words of sorrow are extended on every hand, for the Central Falls mayor had won a strong place in all the hearts of its people. While a Republican in politics, he was not the offensive kind. He would do a kind act in his official capacity for anybody without regard to politics, and it was common talk on the streets that his popularity was such that there was no man who could defeat him for the office."
Eastwood is buried in Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls.
Ellen Eastwood, 1837-1900
Our second great-grandmother Ellen Eastwood was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, and married into the Borden family in 1860.
Stephen Bailey Borden was the eldest son of a laborer, one of nine children. Ellen and Stephen married in a Providence church on June 26, 1860. As a young man, he worked as a dyer in the fabric mills and later as a machinist.
The following year, Stephen went to serve in the Massachusetts Third Infantry, a nine-month regiment that saw little combat action. Chronology suggests Ellen became pregnant just before he left to serve duty, and their child was born soon after his return.
Stephen and Ellen had three daughters, Amy, Nettie, and our great-grandmother, Martha Hathaway Borden. They bought a home at 195 Barnaby Street in Fall River in 1885. Stephen died in 1895, and Ellen died five years later, age 62, with pneumonia. They are buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River.
What the Photographs May Tell Us
The gilded ambrotypes do not carry written names, and no facial comparison can supply certainty without an inscription. Nevertheless, the evidence forms a persuasive pattern.
The three images are of approximately the same period and are presented in similar ornate frames.
They descended through the same family.
The apparent ages of the sitters correspond reasonably well with Ellen, Eastwood, and Benjamin in the late 1850s.
The young woman resembles the later identified portrait of Ellen, and the two men appear to differ in age by about the amount expected between the brothers.
Perhaps most importantly, the three photographs make sense as a family group. John and Jane Eastwood had three adult children who settled in New England: two sons and one daughter. Here we have three similar portraits from that generation and that period: two men and one woman.
After spending so many years unidentified, these three faces may finally have names. They are not simply anonymous people in ornate gold frames. They may be Ellen, Eastwood, and Benjamin—the children of John Eastwood and Jane Simpson, who left the textile districts of Lancashire and began again in New England. They are our only paternal ancestors who did not emigrate to America in the 1600s..
