This cabinet card photograph features a very cute baby wearing a gown and sweater. She has beautiful big eyes According to an inscription on the reverse of the image, the baby is named Atalie Jean Crum and she was five months and two days old, at the time the photograph was taken. Atalie Crum can be found on both the 1900 and 1910 U.S. census. She was born in 1890 and resided in Penn, Illinois. She lived with her parents, Brooke W. Crum, and Laura V. Crum. Both of her parents were born in Pennsylvania and her father was a farmer. The 1910 census reveals that at age twenty, Atalie was employed as a school teacher. A 1913 publication from the Illinois Office of Public Instruction, states that Atalie taught school in Stark County, Illinois (District 53). At an unknown age, she married Claude Sterling, a local farmer. An obituary in the Peoria Star (1936), reports the death of John Wesley Crandell. He died at the age of 78 in Castleton, Illinois. He was his community’s last surviving civil war veteran. A male quartet sang at the funeral and they were accompanied by a Mrs Atalie Sterling at the piano. This is likely the Atalie Sterling in the photograph. Atalie lived a long life, dying in 1969 at age eighty in Wyoming, Illinois. The photographer of this cabinet card is difficult to identify with any certainty. There was a photographer named W. H. Farley who operated in Crete and Gibson Illinois in the 1880’s. A photographer named A. Farley also had a studio in Illinois. Research uncovered another cabinet card with the same Farley logo as this cabinet card. The card was from a studio located in Tampico, Illinois. Tampico is the likely place that Atalie Crum was photographed.
THE CABINET CARD GALLERY 