Family photo mystery may defy solution
Geraldine resident Jo Walker was disappointed when the Anzac Day tribute she planned for her great grandfather was cancelled due to Covid-19, but she soon found herself distracted by a new project.
Walker’s Timaru Herald story in February about organising the Canterbury Mounted Rifles Association (CMRA) to ride into Geraldine on horseback on Anzac Day featured a picture of her holding a photograph of her great grandfather Ernest Edgar Tatam, and prompted contact from Owen Cassidy, of Kaiapoi, who recognised the old photo.
‘‘I have the same photo and it is of my grandfather who was John Cassidy,’’ he told the Herald.
‘‘How two families ended up with the same photo that was taken over 100 years ago is a mystery I don’t think will be solved.’’
Walker first began her research into her great grandfather when she moved to Geraldine last year and, knowing he was from the area, visited the museum to inquire about him.
Sylvia Irvine, one of 13 volunteers at the museum who spends hours archiving items donated by family members, located a few pictures and a document of Tatam’s recollections of the war.
Walker said when Cassidy contacted her about the photo, she felt spurred on to dig
even deeper into Tatam’s past.
‘‘I was more intrigued than anything else.
‘‘If I’m right then it’s bittersweet because I have only just started finding out about my great grandfather but this is the only picture Owen has of his grandfather.’’
She feared it might leave a ‘‘gaping hole’’ in his family history if the picture passed down to him by his father was not who the family thought.
Cassidy says the disputed photo was taken more than 100 years ago by the photographers Standish and Preece in Christchurch, which Walker believes would also support the photo being of Tatam because the dates and locations would match up.
Cassidy visited the Geraldine Museum to look at the photos of Tatam on file but remains unconvinced.
‘‘My father’s cousin supplied those four photos to the museum and was given them by his mother, Ernest’s daughter, when she passed,’’ Walker said.
‘‘Another grandson of Ernest’s, now in his late 80s, confirmed that they are of his grandfather as he remembers him.’’
Irvine said there could be a number of ways the photo ended up in different families, such as war comrades exchanging photos on the return home, but thought it seemed strange the picture showed both men as family remembered them.
Walker has since received more photos of Tatam from her father’s cousin: one of Tatam on his wedding day and one a few years later with his wife and daughters.
‘‘They are irrefutably the same man, with the same woman, names on the back of the original photographs and still he looks different,’’ she said.
‘‘There is definitely a likeness [to the disputed photo], made difficult to deny even with the lighting, hairstyles and facial hair, plus different distances from the camera and photograph quality.’’
She said it goes to show how the same person can look so different in different photographs.
Tatam divorced his wife Eva in about 1832-35 and their daughter remembered Eva tearing up his photographs and throwing them in the fire, so it is a miracle this many survive, Walker said.
Walker then found the ‘‘absolute indisputable concrete evidence’’ she was looking for in the form of a military document containing a photograph of Tatam.
Irvine agreed the men in the photographs look identical, and the only way it could not be Tatam were if the military records were wrong and additional photos had also ended up in Tatam’s family, which was unlikely.
Cassidy said that while he didn’t want to dispute Walker, he didn’t think it was a ‘‘foregone conclusion’’.
‘‘The photograph of the man we say is our grandfather has a cauliflower left ear,’’ he said.
‘‘In all the other pictures [Walker has], yes his facial features are very similar, but he doesn’t have a cauliflower ear.’’
He said looking at pictures of men who went to the Boer War lined up, they all look similar.
Owen Cassidy’s father lived with his father until he was 14 years old when John Cassidy died, he said.
‘‘Why would my father carry around for years until he died, a photo of someone that wasn’t right?’’
Owen is unable to collect the original photo from another family member but will continue to investigate, he said.
‘‘What I have said to Jo, and what is in the back of my mind, is that we could both have the wrong photo.’’