Picturing Family

Whether displayed on household walls, stored on a cell phone or tucked away in a box in the attic, family photographs provide a visual narrative of family relationships and a sense of continuity and connection to earlier generations.

A recent donation of family photographs to the Library of Virginia’s Visual Studies Collection has helped to expand the diversity of Virginians pictured in our collections.

The set of images of the King family of Hanover County was donated by Kathy O’Kane Kreutzer, an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University, who saw the photos listed on a Richmond-area online auction site. Despite lacking any genealogical ties to the family, Kreutzer was determined to preserve their visual heritage. She participated in the auction and successfully acquired every photograph that was made available from the original family collection.

“They were broken into several separate lots, and I kept thinking about what a shame it would be to split up the collection,” said Kreutzer. “The fact that they depicted people of color from our area made me feel even more strongly that it was important to preserve them. I kept going back to them, and finally bid on the photos, hoping that the Library of Virginia would be interested in them.”

Although the auction house described the collection as photographs of a “prominent mulatto family” from Hanover County, one family member’s 1912 birth certificate lists his mother’s race as “Indian,” and the family members have connections to Virginia’s Mattaponi and Pamunkey tribes, so it appears that the family is of Indigenous heritage.

The collection most likely belonged to Ada King, daughter of William M. King and Eliza Wingfield. Ada King’s sister Emma L. King married George F. Custalow, who was chief of the Mattaponi tribe, and her niece Marion King (identified in the family group photo as Marrondelilah) married Ottigney Pontiac Cook Sr., the son of George Major Cook, who was chief of the Pamunkey tribe.

We don’t know how the collection found its way from family members to an online auction. Photographs can get away from their original owners in many ways. Some are misplaced, stolen, or swept away by natural disasters. More often, the inability to identify the people in the photographs is the culprit. Families often face tough decisions when cleaning out homes following the death of a loved one. Once generations have passed, many choose to give away or sell old family photographs rather than keeping pictures of those whose names have long been forgotten.

As a result of her efforts, Kreutzer has ensured the survival of this Virginia family’s photographs and guaranteed that future generations will have access to these visual representations of our collective memory.