This 1870 portrait of a mother and son seems gentle until you notice the boy’s hair. At first look, it feels like a lovely image. A woman in silk, a child resting against her shoulder, the soft blur of a studio background behind them. It feels like love. It felt like love for more than 150 years until one archavist could not stop focusing on the top of that boy’s head.
Ella Narvance had been cataloging photographs at a historical society in Richmond for 11 years. She had handled thousands of images from the antibbellum and reconstruction eras. Everything from dgeray types of Confederate officers to cabinet cards of newly freed families standing stiff and proud outside the first homes they owned.
She knew what to expect from photographs of that time. She understood the poses, the props, and the careful staging meant to show status and respectability. But the image she pulled from a donated estate collection in the spring of 2019 made her stop in a way nothing else had for years. The photograph was a cabinet card about 4x 6 in mounted on thick card stock with the photographers’s name pressed in gold script along the bottom edge.
The woman in the picture appeared to be in her early 30s, wearing a dark silk dress with jet buttons running from her collar down to her waist. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled back in a style common in the early 1870s. She was seated in a carved wooden chair, and her left arm was wrapped around a young boy standing beside her, leaning into the curve of her body.
The boy looked about 6 or seven years old. His clothes were fine, a small velvet suit with a white lace collar, the kind of outfit a wealthy family might choose for a love child on a special day. His skin was brown, his features suggested African ancestry, and his head leaned slightly toward the woman’s shoulder in what first appeared to be a sign of real affection.
Elellanena had seen images like this before. Mixed race families had always existed in American history, even when laws and customs made it impossible to speak of them openly. She first assumed this was one of those photographs. A quiet record of a bond that could not be acknowledged in its own time, but something about the boy’s hair kept pulling her attention back.
It was straight, not softly curled or wavy, which might happen naturally in a child of mixed background. It was straight, flat, almost pressed to his scalp in a way that looked uncomfortable. along the hairline above his left ear. Elellanena noticed a faint discoloration, possibly a chemical burn or the trace of something worse.
She leaned closer, adjusting the angle of her magnifying lamp and felt her stomach tighten. The hair did not look natural. It looked forced. Elellanena Vance had spent more than a decade learning to read photographs the way others read words on a page. She knew that every part of a 19th century studio portrait was intentional.
The backgrounds, the props, the placement of hands and bodies, all of it was arranged to send a clear message. Wealth, morality, family harmony, respectability. Nothing was accidental. So when something in an image did not match the expected pattern, it usually meant the photograph was hiding a story it did not openly tell.
She had seen images where the wrong detail was a pair of manacles partly hidden behind a chair leg. She had seen portraits where a loyal servant behind a white family was positioned so that on closer look an iron collar could be seen at their neck. She had trained herself to look for what did not belong. The objects and details that broke the careful performance of normal life, but she had never seen anything quite like this boy’s hair.
She removed the cabinet card from its protective sleeve and turned it over. On the back in faded pencil, someone had written a name and a date. Adelaide Marsh with Sun, 1870. Below that, in a different handwriting, was a single word that had been partly erased, but was still readable when held at the right angle. The word was Samuel.
Two names, mother and son, according to the writing. But the effort to erase Samuel’s name suggested that someone at some point had wanted to undo whatever claim this photograph made about their relationship. Elellanena placed the card on her desk and stared at it for a long time. She had a feeling, one she had learned to trust, that this was not just a portrait of a mother and her child.
It was proof of something else, and if she did not follow it, whatever truth lay here would remain hidden. The photographers stamp on the card read, “Witmore and company, Richmond.” Elellanena started there, pulling city directories from the 1860s and 1870s to trace the studios past. She found it listed on Broad Street from 1858 through 1879, run by a man named Thomas Whitmore, who advertised portraits of distinction for families of quality.
The wording was common for the time, meant to signal that the studio served wealthy white clients. But a deeper look into Whitmore’s business records, donated to a university archive in the 1990s, revealed something more. Whitmore had kept a separate ledger for what he called special commissions. These were portraits taken for clients who did not want their names written in the main appointment book.
The entries were brief, showing only initials, dates, and occasional notes about payment. One entry from March 1870 caught Ellanena’s eye and portrait with ward hair preparation required extra fee. Ward, not sun, and hair preparation. The pieces began to come together, though the picture they formed was deeply troubling.
Elellanena contacted a colleague at a university in Washington, a historian named Dr. Lorraine Okonquo, who specialized in the post-emancipation era and the legal methods white families used to keep control over black children after slavery officially ended. Dr. Aonquo had spent years studying the practice of apprenticing black children to former enslavers, a system that allowed white families to keep black miners as unpaid labor while claiming to provide training and care.
She had also written about companion children. Black children kept in white homes not for labor but for company, dressed well and displayed as proof of kindness. When Elellanena sent her a highresolution scan of the photograph, Dr. Okonquo replied within hours. She wrote that she had seen images like this before.
The clothing, the pose, the closeness to the white woman all fit the pattern, but the hair made this one different. Most companion children were photographed with their natural hair, often styled to highlight their difference from the white family. Straightening a black child’s hair like this would have been painful and rare for that time.
It suggested an effort to oh erase visible signs of his race and make him look more like a biological child. That she said was a deeper form of violence, an attempt to erase identity. Elellanena then searched for more information about Adelaide Marsh. The name appeared in Richmond City directories from 1865 to 1882, listed at a large address in the Church Hill area.
Census records from 1870 showed the household included Adelaide Marsh, age 32, listed as head of household, her widowed mother, Margaret Marsh, age 58, and one servant, a black woman named Celia, age 45. No child was listed at all. This was not unusual for the time. Black children living in white households were often left out of official records or listed in vague ways that hid their true status.
But the absence of any child in a census taken the same year as the photograph raised serious questions. If Samuel was Adelaide’s son, legally or otherwise, why was he not recorded as part of the household? And if he was not her son, then who was he? Elellanena dug further into the Marsh family history. She discovered that Adelaide’s husband, Walter Marsh, a cotton merchant, had died in 1864 during the final year of the Civil War.
His will, filed in the Richmond Probate Court, made provisions for his wife, and clearly listed all servants and their children held by the estate. The Marsh family had been enslavers, and the will showed that those enslaved people were not freed at Walter’s death, but transferred to Adelaide. In an inventory attached to the will was a woman named Celia, aged 39 at the time, and her daughter, unnamed, age 4.
There was no mention of a son. Yet four years later, the census still listed Celia in the household at age 45 with no daughter present, and the photograph showed a boy of about 6 or seven dressed in velvet leaning into Adelaide Marsh’s shoulder as if she were his mother. Elellanena contacted Dr. a conquo again with these findings.
The historian’s reply was calm but bleak. She said the evidence fit a pattern she had seen many times after emancipation. Some white families kept black children even when the adults in those families left or were pushed out. The children were young and easier to control. In some cases, white families claimed legal guardianship through apprenticeship laws.
But the most disturbing cases were those where no legal process existed at all. The family simply kept the child. Sometimes they claimed the child was an orphan. Sometimes they presented the child as adopted. And sometimes, as this photograph suggested, they tried to present the child as their own by blood. The straightened hair fit that pattern.
It was an effort to make the child’s race less visible, and in doing so, to erase who he truly was. Dr. Aonquo explained the wider situation that allowed these kinds of arrangements to exist. Right after the Civil War, Virginia and other former Confederate states passed a group of laws known as the Black Codes.
These laws were created to limit the freedom of newly freed people and push them back into labor systems that were different from slavery in name only. One of the most harmful parts of these laws allowed courts to apprentice black children to white employers, often their former enslavers, if the children were judged to be orphans, abandoned, or without proper support.
What counted as proper support was decided by white judges who often ruled that black parents struggling in the broken postwar economy were unfit to raise their own children. But even this legal system did not explain every child who remained in white households. Some children were kept through informal deals, spoken promises, or simple force.
A black mother working as a domestic servant might be told that if she wanted to keep her job, her child would have to stay in the household, too. The child might be introduced to visitors as a ward, a companion, or as in the marsh photograph, something deliberately unclear. The practice was common enough that it had its own language.
Yard children, house children, pet children. Words that made the situation sound harmless while hiding the deep violence underneath. The hair is what makes this case especially disturbing. Dr. Aonqua explained later during a follow-up call. Hair straightening for black people in that time period was rare and extremely painful.
The most common method used lie-based chemicals that could cause serious burns if left on too long. For a child of six or say then to go through that process again and again just to keep his hair straight would have been deeply traumatic. It suggested the family was not only keeping the child as a companion or servant but was actively trying to change him into something else.
They were trying to erase who he was. Elellanena found herself going back to the photograph repeatedly, studying the boy’s face for any sign of what he might have been feeling at that moment. His expression was hard to understand. Long exposure times meant people had to stay still for several seconds, often leaving faces stiff or blank.
But there was something in the tight set of his mouth. It might have been pain, or it might have been fear, or something harder to name. She wondered if his scalp was still burning from the chemicals used to flatten his hair. She wondered if he knew why he was dressed in velvet and placed beside this woman. She wondered if he remembered his mother and whether his mother had ever truly been given a choice.
The next step required a trip to Richmond to the church where the Marsh family had been members. Elellanena made the drive in early summer, traveling from her office in the Shannondoa Valley to meet the archavist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, one of the oldest and wealthiest churches in the city. The church stood prominently on Grace Street, its white steeple visible from blocks away.
During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis himself had worshiped there, and the pews were still marked with small bra, SS plaques showing the names of families who had bought them generations earlier. The marsh name appeared on one of those plaques in the third row from the front. The church had kept careful records of births, deaths, marriages, and baptisms going back to the 18th century.
In the antibbellum period, these records served two purposes. They documented the spiritual lives of the white congregation, but they also sometimes recorded the baptisms of enslaved people owned by church members. These entries were usually brief and often lacked last names, listing only a first name, the owner’s name, and a date.
They were in effect property records hidden inside religious books. If Samuel had been baptized there, or if any official note had been made about his relationship to Adelaide Marsh, it would appear in those ledgers. The archavist, a retired school teacher named Mrs. Dorothy Hail, was skeptical at first.
She led Elellanena through a hallway lined with portraits of former recctors and said that the Marsh family had been generous supporters of the church for generations. She questioned what Elellanena expected to find that would truly matter to history, but when Elellanena showed her the photograph. Mrs. Hail’s expression shifted.
She studied the image carefully, then looked up with something close to recognition, she said she had seen the boy before, not in person, of course, but in another photograph in the collection. The second image, which Mrs. Hail retrieved from a storage row in the church basement, showed the same boy about 10 years older.
He was dressed in a plain dark suit, standing behind a seated group of white women at what appeared to be a church event. The women were smiling, holding fans against the summer heat, their faces relaxed. Behind them, Samuel stood stiff and upright. His hair was short now, natural with tight curls clearly visible even in the faded photograph.
He was not looking at the camera. He was staring down at the floor, his hands clasped in front of him in a posture of strict control. There was no velvet, no lace collar, no gentle lean into anyone’s shoulder. The companion child had become something else. Elellanena studied the two photographs side by side, trying to understand them together.
The boy in velvet and the servant in dark wool, the painfully straightened hair and the natural curls of a teenager finally allowed to look like himself. The possessive arm and the empty space between bodies. It felt like looking at two different people, except the face was clearly the same. The same eyes, the same shape of the jaw.
But something in his expression had hardened over time. Any softness that had existed or been staged in the earlier image was completely gone. In its place was something guarded and alert, aware of the camera and the power it held. The church records confirmed what Elellanena had begun to suspect. Samuel had never been legally adopted by Adelaide Marsh.
He had never been baptized as her son. Instead, there was a single entry dated 1876, noting the return of a colored ward named Samuel to his people at the request of his mother, Celia. Celia had apparently remained in the Marsh household as a domestic servant during the years her son was being presented as Adelaide’s companion.
The entry was short and official in tone, almost cold, but its meaning was devastating. For 6 years, Celia had watched her son be dressed up and shown off as another woman’s child. She had watched his hair be burned straight. She had watched him posed for photographs that erased her completely.
And then, at last, she had found a way to bring him home. Dr. Aonquo helped Ellanena locate records from a black church in Richmond, founded by formerly enslaved people in 1866. Known in its early years as the Colored Baptist Church of Richmond, it had been established in the basement of an old warehouse just months after the war ended.
Its founders were men and women who had lived their entire lives in bondage, who had been forbidden to read or write, denied legal marriage, and denied the right to keep their children. One of the first things they did with their freedom was create an institution that would record their lives in their own words. The church kept its membership roles separate from white churches that refused to accept black members as equals or confined them to segregated balconies.
These roles were more than lists of names. They recorded marriages once denied. They recorded births of children. N who would not be sold away. They recorded deaths and honored lives, however short, and sometimes they recorded reunions. In those records, Elellanena found Celia listed as a founding member with a note stating she had been reunited with her son Samuel in 1876.
The wording was brief but careful. Reunited, not received or obtained, or any of the softer terms white recordkeepers often used. Reunited acknowledged a wrong separation and a bond that had never truly been broken. Another entry dated 1879 recorded Samuel’s marriage to a woman named Hannah. A third entry from 1882 noted the birth of their first child, a daughter named Elellanena.
Learning that the boy in the photograph had survived, reclaimed his identity, and built a family and life beyond the Marsh household was both comforting and complicated. It meant the story did not end with his erasia. But it also raised difficult questions about how to tell this story now, more than a century later, when descendants on all sides might still be alive.
Elellanena Vance presented her findings to the historical society’s director, Richard Townsend, who had hired her 10 years earlier and usually trusted her instincts. She laid out the photographs, the records, her correspondence with Dr. Aonquo, and explained what the evidence showed. The 1870 portrait was not a picture of a mother and her son.
It was an image of a white woman and a black child she kept as a companion, a living object whose hair had been chemically straightened to make him resemble her own child. The inscription on the back, Adelaide Marsh with sun, was not a statement of family, but a claim of ownership disguised as love. Towns End listened closely, reviewed the materials, then leaned back with a long breath.
He said this would be complicated. The Marsh family had been major donors for generations, and their descendants were still connected to the board. Reframing the photograph this way would anger many people. “There are already people who are angry,” Ellena replied. “They are just the descendants of Samuel and Celia, not Adelaide Marsh, and their pain has been ignored for 150 years.
” The board meeting took place 3 weeks later. Elellanena presented her research to a room full of people who shifted uneasily in their chairs as she placed the two photographs side by side. The velvet dressed companion child from 1870 and the household servant from 1880. She explained the hair straightening, the missing census records, and the church entries that traced Celia’s long struggle to reclaim her son.
She quoted Dr. Ronquo’s analysis of the companion child practice and how it connected to the larger systems of racial control that continued long after emancipation. When she finished, the room stayed quiet for a long moment. Then, a woman near the back, someone Elellanena recognized as a descendant of the Marsh family, raised her hand.
She said she did not understand what Elellanena wanted them to do with this information. Her voice was calm but sharp. She said Elellanena was essentially asking them to accuse her ancestors of kidnapping a child based on a photograph and a few church records. Elellanena answered carefully. She said she was not accusing anyone of anything.
She said she was asking the society to tell the truth about what the photograph showed. For decades, the image had been displayed with a caption calling it a portrait of a mother and son. That caption was not true. The boy was not Adelaide Marsh’s son. He was the son of a woman named Celia who worked in the Marsh household and spent years trying to get him back.
If the society continued to show the image with the old caption, she said it would be taking part in the same erasia that had been done to Celia and Samuel in their own time. The discussion went on for more than an hour. Some board members argued the evidence was indirect and that Elellanena was reading too much into unclear historical records.
Others worried about how it would look to publicly correct the history of a well-known local family. But a few voices, including a newer board member who taught African-American history at a nearby college, argued strongly that the society had a duty to tell accurate stories, even when those stories made people uncomfortable.
In the end, a middle ground was reached. The photograph would be shown again with a new expanded caption that acknowledged uncertainty about the relationship between the two figures and explained the practice of companion children in the Poe. Sterville War South. A small exhibition would be built around the image, showing both photographs and excerpts from church records that documented Samuel’s return to his mother.
The society would also try to contact any living descendants of Samuel and Celia and invite them to take part in telling the fuller story. Finding those descendants took another 6 months. Elellanena worked with a genealogologist named Marcus Webb, who specialized in tracing African-American family histories, a slow and difficult task made harder by destroyed records.
And by the way, black families had often been separated and scattered. Webb explained that tracing a line like Samuel’s meant working both backward and forward at the same time, using whatever broken pieces of evidence still existed. Marriage licenses, death certificates, rare property records, school enrollment lists, membership roles from churches and fraternal groups, often across several cities as families moved to find work or escape violence.
The search was made even harder by the great migration when millions of black Americans left the south for cities in the north and west in the early 20th century, looking for better jobs, safer neighborhoods, and freedom from Jim Crow laws. Their descendants could be almost anywhere. Webb followed Samuel’s son through census records to Baltimore in 1910, then to Philadelphia by 1920.
From there, the trail became clearer. Samuel’s granddaughter had married a steel worker named Holland, their child. Ren stayed in Philadelphia, and eventually Webb found a woman named Patricia Holland, living in the Germantown neighborhood. She was a retired nurse whose great great grandmother had been named Hannah.
Her family Bible included an entry for Hannah’s husband, Samuel, with a note that read, “Born in bondage, taken as a child, returned to his mother by the grace of God.” Patricia Holland came to Richmond for the opening of the exhibition. She stood in front of the 1870 photograph for a long time without speaking, her hand resting against the glass case as if she could reach through it.
When she finally turned to Elellanena, tears were on her face, but she was smiling. She said her grandmother used to talk about him, she called him the stolen son. She said he never spoke about those years, but his mother Celia used to say the white woman dressed him like a doll and burned his hair to make him look like something he was not.
The family had always thought it was just a story. They never knew there was a photograph. The exhibition ran for 4 months and drew more visitors than any previous show at the historical society. Local newspapers covered the story and several academic journals published articles about the companion child practice using the marsh photograph as a case study. Dr.
Okonquo gave a lecture at the society to a packed hall explaining how Samuel’s story fit into a wider pattern of white families keeping control over black children through both legal and illegal mean s after emancipation. She showed images from Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi. all showing well-dressed black children posed beside white women who were not their mothers.
The exhibition also led to a wider re-examination within the historical society itself. Staff began reviewing other items that had entered the collection decades earlier with little context or misleading labels. They found photographs marked family servant that showed children far too young to be working.
They found portraits described as nurse in charge, where the so-called nurse was barely older than the infant in her arms. They found images of black people with no names at all, labeled only as domestic scene or household group. Each of these items was now being researched, redescribed, and when possible, connected to descendants who might have their own stories to share.
Richard Townsend, the director who had once worried about donor reactions, told Ellaner the exhibition had changed how he understood the society’s mission. He said they had been treating photographs as objects to preserve and display. But they were not just objects, they were evidence.
And for more than a century, the society had presented that evidence in a way that supported one version of history while silencing another. He said he did not know how to undo all of that. But they had to begin somewhere. For Elellanena, the most powerful moment came near the end of the exhibition when Patricia Holland returned to Richmond with her daughter and two grandchildren.
They stood together in front of the photograph, four generations of Samuel’s family, looking at the image of a boy who had been erased and then reclaimed, taken, and returned. The youngest child, a girl about 7 years old, the same age Samuel had been in the photograph, pointed at the image and asked her great great grandmother, who the people were.
Patricia Holland knelt beside her and said that the boy was her great great great great grandmother’s son. His name was Samuel, and the woman beside him was not his mother. His real mother was a woman named Celia, who loved him so deeply that she spent years fighting to bring him home. And she did.
She brought him back. The girl looked again at the photograph, then back at her great great grandmother and asked why his hair looked like that. Patricia was quiet for a moment. Then she said it was because they were trying to make him into something he was not, but it did not work. He always knew who he was, and now they knew too.
Photographs can lie. That is not a new idea, but it is one worth repeating every time we look at an old image and think we understand it. A camera captures a moment, but that moment is always arranged, always framed, always a performance of what the subjects and the photographer want us to believe. A white woman in silk with a black child in velvet, a gentle lean into a motherly embrace.
These images tell a story of love, family, and belonging. But the details tell another story. The burned hairline, the missing census record, the separate ledger for special commissions, the church entry, noting a return that never should have been needed. Samuel’s photograph is not rare. Archives, atticts, and museum storage rooms across the country hold thousands of images like it.
Portraits meant to show kindness and care, but which actually record something far darker. Children dressed as companions and displayed as proof of a slaveholder’s goodness. Families posed to hide the violence that held them together. Hair burned straight, skin lightened, identities stripped away to protect the idea that what was happening was normal, natural, and good.
Every one of these photographs is a crime scene. And everyone is also a record, if we learn how to read it, of people who survived. Samuel survived, Celia survived, their descendants survived, carrying the story forward even when the image tried to erase it. The next time you see an old portrait and feel a warm connection to the past, look closer.
Look at the hands, the hair, the edges of the frame. Look for what does not fit. Look for the story the image is trying not to tell because that story belongs to someone and they have been waiting a very long time for someone to notice.
