Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Unknown Soldiers

A month or so ago I discovered the Liljenquist Family Collection at the Library of Congress (LOC). This collection of nearly 700 or so ambrotypes and tintypes was collected over the years by the Liljenquist family and only recently was donated to "America's Library" (aka the LOC) for posterity. The LOC has digitized many of the images and set up a flickr page with many of the images. Unfortunately, many of the soldiers and individuals depicted in the images are unknown.

I began looking through many of the images on the page, looking at the differing faces of those who fought on both sides. The collection really shows the breadth and diversity of the soldiers who engaged in the Civil War.

However, I came to this picture here:


I was intrigued, to say the least, by this picture. The facial features seem very feminine, which got me thinking if this soldier was actually a woman (of which there have been numerous examples of, the most notable being Albert Cashier aka Jennie Hodgers). What do you think?

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