Dig This Treasure!

So, I’ve written in the past about how the most rewarding part of finding things at estate sales and reselling them on eBay (besides sometimes hitting big) is how much new stuff I learn about old things, and how cool it feels to connect someone to something they end up cherishing. I never used to consider myself a person who got excited about really old stuff–I’ve never liked historical fiction and I’ve never gotten excited about seeing old historical documents in person. History just seems boring when you grow up learning about it through textbooks.

But obviously that’s changed over the years, and one thing I’ve always loved are photographs, I guess because they capture a REAL moment in time in a way that no other medium can. So I’ve written about a few different types of photographs I’ve found and discovered are valuable by accident. My favorite photos to find are ones of people with their pets, just because I’m an animal lover. I’m thinking of starting a recurring type of entry that features those pictures.

Anyway, I’ve periodically come across photographs that seem really old and are mounted on hard, round edged, smooth cardstock. They’re always priced a little higher than other cards, which is why I’ve never bought very many. Well, last week Erin and I hit a sale where there was tons of old paper, including a huge box of dirty (as in not clean) antique photographs. I grabbed the whole thing. There were lots of different kinds of pictures but many of them were like these:

After doing some research, I discovered that these are called cabinet cards. There’s actually a really helpful Wikipedia entry about cabinet cards and provides some info that can help you date them. In general, they were the popular style of portrait photographs between 1870 and the 1890s. There were 22 of these in the lot I found, but unfortunately, because they were stored in bad conditions, they aren’t in super great shape. Here’s a picture of most of them: 

I have them up on eBay now, if you’re interested.

The other cool thing is that along with these photographs, I found lots of other ephemera (letters, cards, etc.), including the wedding invite for that baby in the lower right corner! The back of that picture said “Beulah” and in an envelope in a stack of papers, I found this:

Sort of sad, but also sort of cool!

So the other thing I learned about cabinet cards is that the most valuable ones are either post-mortem pictures of children, or pictures of Civil War era soldiers. Speaking of post-mortem photos, here’s an update on mine from a week or so ago:

So yes, there are lots of individuals out there who like to collect antique pictures of dead people, and they’ll pay you a lot of money for them.

One last thing–even more valuable are carte de visite (CDV) photographs, which are from the era before cabinet cards became popular. So keep your eyes peeled for those!

-Sarah