Found Photo: The Ketchum Girls

I have a soft spot for orphan photos, especially when I see them sitting in dusty baskets at an estate sale or serving as mere decoration in an antique store. I could browse through Flickr's Found Photographs pool and DeadFred.com for hours, just wondering about the stories behind the pictures. When I walked into Patina, a gorgeous little antique store here in downtown Sioux Falls, and saw this photo of two beautiful little girls, I knew I had to take it home.


I could also see that this photo had the potential to be reunited with those who would love it even more than I do: it has a photography studio's name imprinted on the front and, even better, someone scrawled names on the back.

The front bears the name F. J. Brown and an address, 243 Commercial St. (Ground Floor), Salem, Oregon. On the back, in old ink, it says "Gene and Bess Ketchum of Independince [sic] Ore. daughters of Dr. and Mrs. Alice Ketchum."


That gave me a great running start. I first looked up Independence, Oregon, on a map, and learned that it's in Polk County, so I visited the Polk County Oregon GenWeb site. Thinking about the "Dr. Ketchum" involved, I clicked on "Death Certificates." One of the first death certificate transcriptions I came across, for a gentleman who passed away in 1903, included the name of the presiding doctor, E. L. Ketchum.

I then moved to Ancestry.com, where I searched for anyone named Ketchum in Independence, Oregon, in 1910. They were there: Dr. Eugene L. Ketchum, his wife Alice, and three children. The children, Helen (14), Ruth (13), and adult Laverne (29), didn't immediately fit the bill.

Going back another 10 years, though, it was pretty clear: two of Eugene and Alice's four children were Helen Jean Ketchum, born January 1896, and Ruth Elizabeth Ketchum, born March 1897. Jean and Bess!

I followed their family tree in both directions--that is to say, forward in time and backward--hoping to find a direct descendant of one of the two girls on Ancestry.com. They were fairly easy to trace, as their extended family had remained in the same area for many decades.

A Jean Ketchum could be found in 1920, boarding with a family in Tacoma, Washington, and working as a teacher in the public schools. A hint from a public tree said that her husband's name was Charles Bauer, and with that, I was able to find her in 1930, living back in Salem, Oregon, at 2150 Hazel Avenue. Her husband was a life insurance agent, and they had a 3-year-old daughter named Mary A. Bauer.

I found that Bess (or Beth, as it turns out she was called) married Charles Leland Stidd, who was, by 1930, the Vice President of a loan association. They lived in Portland, Oregon, and had two children: Charles K. Stidd (11) and Betty J. Stidd (9).

So I turned to Google and typed in the name "Charles K. Stidd." Up popped numerous links referring to men named Charles Stidd, among them a post on a Stidd message board at Ancestry.com in 2002. The author stated that Charles K. Stidd of Portland, Oregon, was his father. I e-mailed him the same evening. With that, I found little Bess's grandson!

Google also led me to an obituary for Betty Stidd, who lived to be 85 and had three grown children with unusual names (i.e., names that were easy to track down online).

The grandson's e-mail address was no longer in use, but his name is unique enough to make it easy to find him on Facebook. We've exchanged a couple of e-mails, and soon the photo will be in the mail.

I still don't know how this picture came to be in South Dakota, but that's a mystery that will probably remain unsolved.