The course of events that resulted in the Robbins photo album winding up in an antique mall in Azle, Texas may never be resolved, but I believe I’ve at least identified the family. Expecting this mystery to torment me for years, I suppose I underestimated what ancestry.com and a little determined sleuthing can accomplish. As it’s turned out, the photo album chronicles the lives of the Robbins family of Southwest Harbor, Maine.
This search would have been hopeless if it hadn’t been for the various names that accompany some of the photographs, and my “eureka moment” came when I looked for a tie between the Norwood and Robbins surnames. I searched ancestry.com for the name Eva Robbins, Eva being prominent in the album, and, as I expected, found several. But by taking the location and other family member names into account, I was able to find her in an earlier census report, as Eva Norwood. It appears that Eva Norwood, born around 1904, married Eugene Robbins, and that couple is at the core of the family chronicled in the album.
There were certainly challenges that accompanied this research, mainly due to the casual use of names from one census report to another. (Eva was sometimes Evangeline, and her mother, Elizabeth, was sometimes Lizzy) Anyone that has searched ancestry.com knows how easily a promising find can result in a dead-end, but the presence of the names “Mildred” and “Helen” in the album, revealed to be names of Eva’s siblings in the census, made me a believer. Of course there are still loose ends, as I couldn’t find a compelling link between Watson Robbins and what I believe to be the rest of the Robbins clan. (a cousin?)
There’s more research to do, and with more time and a little luck I might be able to tidy this up a little, but only to a point. The real problem is that census records are currently available only up to 1930, so tracking the family to the present day is next to impossible. Perhaps lightning will strike and I’ll hear from a descendant, but given that this wonderful family archive was set adrift, I’m not optimistic. I’ll continue to post the photos periodically and look for further clues. The album page at the top can be seen in a huge version.
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Excellent sleuthing skills! I would still hold out some hope that descendants are around; I don’t know if they’ll drop by this page but again…you never do know. A lot of the time, especially if there are numerous kids involved, the stuff in parents houses is split up. And some of those kids might care A LOT about family history, others might not at all. Then there’s the sibling relations where one might keep this, or get rid of it, just to spite the others. My Mum is from Switzerland and her 3 siblings still live there; when they sold the family home in the 90s, this is basically what happened. She was in Canada, so couldn’t pick what she wanted unless she had laid claim YEARS ago. Her sister is a bit of a snot, took charge of the sale and took a bunch of things Mum wanted. There’s now a ton of things my Mum remembers from the house, but she hasn’t a clue where they got to. Whenever we’re in Switzerland, we go to as many flea markets/thrift shops as we can find and I’m sure she’s always keeping an eye out for lost family heirlooms…
You’re absolutely right, Rueby, there’s always hope. And who knows, if a family member ever gets the genealogy bug and Google’s “Eva Robbins” or “Eugene Robbins”, they just might wind up here! Just out of curiosity, I Googled “Eva Robbins”, in quotation marks, followed by the word “Maine”, and there was this post, just a couple of hours after writing it, right up top. Amazing!