The gray velvet album, which has since unfortunately fallen apart, seems to have been the family photo album of John C. Cahalan Sr. and Anna Hogan Cahalan, and most certainly came from the house at 100 Orange Street. John and Anna were married in 1883, and their wedding photo, number 140: 3a, is here. Some photos may be earlier, and most are necessarily later, though I have the impression that the album was filled up quickly: most of the pictures seem to date from the 1880's.

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The album here consists of 48 images, over two web pages.  The second half of the album is here: The Gray Velvet Album II.

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The album presents several intriguing mysteries, not only among the large number of unidentified photos, but among those we can identify only by face in several photos--in other words, we know they're images of the same person, but we don't know who. A future page will group them for discovery, perhaps, by someone who can name them. It is entirely likely that this group of images contains some of the earliest photos we have of Cahalans in 'the immigrant generation,' as well as Hogan relations. I make a few stabs at identification in the captions. A few advertising cards, found tucked into the spaces behind the last pictures in the album, are also shown at the end.

 

Numbered in the order in which they were scanned--a second number indicates the sequence of images in the album, while a indicates the face, or obverse, of the photo, and b indicates its reverse (if information was to be found there), so that 140:3a is the 140th photo scanned, the third in the Gray Velvet Album and the the image shows the face of the photo--the collection includes several photographs which have been identified; that information is included in the captions to the images. The originals were first grouped and scanned on May 4th, 2007, and are filed under that date. They have been re-scanned at a higher definition for this upload.