Bridgeport, Douglas County, WA Elementary School, 1935

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Front Row: Gladice (Gladys) Lilly, George Weber, Bob Lilly, Bunny Allen, Donald Pierce, James Collins, Grover Collins, Earl Stromer, Erwin Lindert (another photo says KYLE JENKINS), Darrell Britt, Jim Cox, Lee Hanford, Tex Troutman, Sonny (Arnold) Bowers, Kneel (Neal) Jenkins, Donna Ham.

Second Row: Ella Brooks, Dorothy Childers, Esther Lilly, Norene (Noreen) Handford (Hanford), Lois Livingston, Danny Queen, Bruce Monroe, Paul Earod (Eyraud), Glenn Lilly, Dean Monroe, Lawrence (Larry) Bowers, Dale Parker, Arnold Earnsburger (Ernsberger), Paul Lilly, Marjorie (Margie) Six, Janet Mackey, Jean Pike, Peggy Brooks, Pauline Collins.

3rd Row: Betty Brooks, Olive Mineard, Katherine Dezelem, Neta Belle (Bill) Lilly, Mary Pike, June Lilly, Mary Hice, Margy Stromer, Florence McLean, Marjorie Lamore (Margie Lamoreaux), Lanna Lu Bouska, Elsie Mae Cox, Doris Marie Slade, Marie (Thelma) Collins, Ellen Kilby, Norma Monroe, Roberta Monroe, Marjorie Parker, Barbara Ernsberger, Hilda Claire Kilby (another photo says Shirley Dezellem).

Teachers: Florence Dahlke, Mr. Lloyd Harold Noblitt, Mrs. Lulu Marticia (Blackburn) Queen.

Richmond, Indiana Montgomery Ward store opening- photos from 1929

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I’ve had these photos of my grandfather’s for a few years. Beyond looking for my grandmother (she’s not there), I didn’t ever do anything with them. Until last week. I decided that with a little focused attention, I could learn something.

Background: Siegfried Fehlhaber arrived in the U.S. in 1923 as a thirty year old from Greifswald, Germany. He made his way to Akron, Ohio and later moved on to Chicago. There, he met my grandmother and they married in November, 1929. What he did from 1923-1929 is unclear. But it seems like in the late 1920s, he worked on the opening of a number of Montgomery Wards stores.

Store #1 – Richmond, Indiana

The first store I figured out was in Richmond, Indiana – near the Ohio border. There’s a photo of an unnamed man, probably part of the work team. Lucky for me, you can see the Tivoli theater sign behind him. I found it on an old postcard of downtown Richmond on this web page about the theater, which opened in December, 1926.

Looking at the angle of the neon blade sign, I guessed the store was on 9th St. Including the street in the search proved to be key – I found it identified as the former Montgomery Ward and currently the Bullerdick furniture store.

Siegfried Fehlhaber standing outside the Richmond, Indiana Mongomery Ward on S. 9th St.

Above: Siegfried Fehlhaber standing outside the newly built Richmond, Indiana Mongomery Ward on S. 9th St. Probably 1929 (based on other photos).

The same bricks and pediment can be seen in this group photo and in the Google street view.

The original photos are black and white – they’ve been colorized with the DeOldify tool at MyHeritage – it’s an amazing tool.

Monroe cousins about 1945?

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Another large negative scanned. You can click on it to see a bigger version.

Back row – Bruce Monroe (son of Leonard), Dean & JoAnn Monroe (children of Raleigh), Louise and Dick Mullen (children of Sue)

Front row – ?? , Warren, Lonnie (the little guy)? , ?? , Don

Help needed! Let me know if you know who’s who -thanks!

Here’s the color version –

Scanning and colorizing black and white negatives.

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Here are the results of a quick attempt to scan large format negatives.

Scanning was done on a flatbed scanner (Canon MF4150) at 600 dpi. I closed the lid and that worked just fine for most negatives. Only the really dark negatives (underexposed) had a problem with this method.

I used a photo editor (paint.net) to “invert” the black and white negative image into the image below.

Then, I used DeOldify. There is an open-source version that I used to colorize these photos. A quick video on how to use this tool is here. (For a first attempt, I used the Remini app on my phone and that worked well, too.)

A few tricks with DeOldify – the image must live somewhere on the web – you need to point to a URL to process an image. After pasting in the URL to the “Colorize!!” section of the page in the field “Sourcer URL” , I went to Runtime/Run all. Then scroll down on the page to see the results. You can right-click and save the image to your hard drive as a .png file.

Move the slider below to see the colorization.