Sometime in the early 1970s I stopped at a yard sale near Lockport, a town on the Erie Canal northeast of Buffalo, New York — very likely in the yard of the house in this photograph.  There I bought a box of photographic memorabilia; a box camera, a small stack of envelopes full of fading photographs and two boxes of 4”x5” glass plate negatives.  The camera, an Imperial Camera Company Model A, is almost certainly the camera used to take most of the glass plate negatives.  The Imperial Camera Company existed from 1898 to 1904 before being bought out by a larger company but I have found no record of this specific camera.  I know it existed — here’s a photograph of it.

 

Forty years later I decided to print these glass plates using a technique common in the days when they were taken -- albumen printing.  I made the albumen prints from digital negatives of the scanned plates; a bit bigger than the originals.I wish I could identify the family but with nothing to go on but the photographs, alas, I cannot. 

 

Their great-grandchildren should have these photographs rather than a photographer 2725 miles (I looked it up) from Lockport, New York