Identifying Two Women in a Photo

Last week, my dad sent me this photo which was labeled “Cassie McCluskey and Linda Peters.” He said the original was “so light you could hardly make out the figures of the two ladies. [He] had to push the contrast and darkness really hard to get an image, hence the jet black areas in some places (around Linda’s eyes for instance).”

Although we are related to Peters, we do not have a Linda Peters – as either a maiden or married name – in our tree. And, as far as we know, we aren’t related to the McCluskey family. So, who are these two women? Are they our relatives?

I started with Cassie McCluskey since it’s a fairly uncommon name. In Ancestry, I went to “search” and then “all categories” and entered her name. Since our Peters family lived in Kansas, I entered that for location.

The top result was for a Cassie G. McCluskey in the 1895 Kansas state census living in Geulph, Sumner County, Kansas. This is the same area our Peters family lived! She was listed as having been born in Missouri about 1875.

I next went to a Facebook group that helps date photos. I got several replies, all of them saying the photo was dated in either the late 1890’s or early 1900’s. If Cassie, on the left, was born about 1875, she would have been about 25 years old in 1900. So, both the late 1890’s and early 1900’s make sense.

As I looked for a Linda Peters in my tree, I came across Luda (Tibbetts) Peters who was born in 1872 so she was about the same age as Cassie. Since the writing on the photo was so difficult to read, we are pretty much convinced this is a photo of Luda, not Linda.

If anyone is related to either Cassie (McCluskey) Long or Luda (Tibbetts) Peters, I’d love to talk! I’d also love to see more photos of both women to solidify the conclusion of the identities of these two women. (Please leave a comment or email me at drleeds@sbcglobal.net.)