A cousin, Don Venable, came to the Rea Reunion last June for the first time. His grandmother was Amanda Rea Hartis and Don came into possession of very old, framed portraits of Green Lee Rea and his son John L (I am not saying John Laney here because of some recent discoveries). He brought the portraits to the reunion and it was quite a treat to see the images that are as close to the originals as we will probably ever get.
Anyway, Don is very interested in pictures and after examining our Picture Mystery post decided to offer his take on the mystery and sent a very nicely put-together PDF file as an email attachment a couple weeks after the reunion. But when we tried to post it on the blog, the PDF file just would not take. I tried to convert it into another format and that wasn’t working. Well, here it is months later and we finally find something that works and now anyone who visits this blog can see what they think of Don’s analysis. I think I recall that he had some expert help, too.
There is a mistake in the dating. If Don is right and the wedding picture is of John L Rea and Isabelle McAuley, then the date would be May 1880 making John 53 and Isabelle 30….which probably fits their appearance even better. This could very well be the solution to our mystery. Something that still bothers me though is the apparent differences in the nose toward the tip, that lump. The angle and the lighting of the 2 pictures on the bottom is so similar that it is hard to explain why the noses would be different. Maybe one nose was retouched and the other was not? Wouldn’t it be nice to have more than one picture of Green Lee Rea?
