Collection of unknowns

I have a huge collection of old photos from my great-aunt and great-grandfather that I periodically dip into. Recently, I've been trying to scan them with the idea that I would put the scanned photographs into deep storage or use them in art projects. There are many photos of people that appear to have no connection to my family at all. There is usually no identifying information on the back. Not even a date. Even if the people in these photos did, at one point, have a connection to my family, there is really no one left to identify the people who could be former acquaintances, lovers, co-workers, etc. The pictures I am talking about are those that have none of my relatives (that I can identify) in them. The unknowns who were photographed with an obvious relative could possibly be identified by my father (that's another aspect of the project - getting people identified and stories told). What to do with all the photos of unknowns? I could at least post some of them here.

Who are these unknowns? Are they actors? Dinner theater performers? Circus performers? Costume party guests? Who knows, but it looks as though they were having fun.

Old tintype

I've been trying to photograph every day, but today I got caught up in scanning a bunch of old photos from my great aunt's scrapbooks. With that came some online searches for a place I knew as a kid and people that Pat was friends with. The day seemed to escape from me (as it does when I get sucked into the rabbit hole of the web...perhaps I should say something silly like, "caught in the web of the web" - ugh!).

There was a tintype in Pat's collection that may have been of her mother. I can't really tell but I see a similarity to another photo that has "your mother" written on the back. The tintype is pretty damaged but the picture is intact. I did a little Photoshop work but wasn't really interested in doing a ton of restorative work on it today. If this was my great-grandmother, then the girl is Mary Louise Butler who was born in 1887 and died about 5 weeks after I was born in 1965.

Mary Louise Butler?

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