Maria Howard in Mourning

This is a detail from a larger photograph of Maria Howard, her son Will, and her husband Charles. Back when I first started to connect photographs to my research, I tentatively dated the photograph to about 1896 based on the age of the subjects and the location. Maria's dark dress also suggested she might have been wearing mourning for her father, William Richardson, who died in October of 1895.

Recently, I became curious about Maria's brooch. As it turns out, a closer look lends credence to the idea that she was mourning her father when this picture was taken; she is wearing a glass-faced locket, a form of mourning jewelry in the nineteenth century. (Collector Hayden Peters featured a lovely example of a similar locket in pendant form on his blog in 2010.) Although the brooch isn't in sharp focus, it does appear to hold a man's photograph.

Knowing that Maria wore mourning for her father doesn't tell us anything about their relationship; a show of mourning was a prescribed form of grieving in 1896. Wearing a brooch with a visible photograph, however, seems more personal than simply wearing black, a choice you would be more likely to make if you were grieving privately as well as publicly. Its weight would have been different from a similar gesture in the 21st century—I suspect it would have been construed as a signal for discretion and quiet support rather than a conversation opener—but still there is a sense of communicating a particular loss. Combined with the evidence I've found that the Richardsons visited each other frequently, it suggests a closeness.

When I enlarged this picture, I had just spent a lot of time searching for an antique locket to hold a picture of my father on my wedding day. Even though the one I chose looks nothing like the one in this photograph, I think the gesture is the same: an expression of a particular grief and love.