100 years and 7 days later…

These photos were taken around the Russian Empire in 1911 (100 years ago!), great examples of very early color photography. Forgot to note the name of the photographer, but the images are found in the US Library of Congress. The last picture was taken in my paternal grandmother’s hometown of Chernigov, Ukraine. She was born in 1904 so she would have been 7 when this picture was taken – kind of weird to think she may have seen this old river dude before moving to the US in 1914. She and her family got on the last boat out of the port of Odessa in July 1914 before Russia closed its borders for most of the rest of the 20th century- WWI started the following month, the Russian Revolution started soon after, Lenin and Stalin, WWII, the Cold War… Her father bought the family tickets on a steamship for a cruise to Athens. They jumped shipped there and sailed for New York, leaving family and the family’s fortune behind.