"Legends and Lies in Female Soldier Portraits" Article in Military Images Magazine

 I recently came across this article by Kurt Luther, founder of Civil War Photo Sleuth, an online tool for users to help identify individuals in images.  In his piece in Military Images magazine, he deals with misidentified images of women soldiers.  Among the photos he mentions is allegedly one of Jennie Hodgers in the collection of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.  I was actually going to use it in my book.  Sent the $165 check  and everything.  As you can see, the image is not viewable on their website.  I assumed based on the description that it was the photo below. But when I received the image via Dropbox, it was not what I thought.  And I had serious reservations about whether the soldier depicted was indeed Hodgers.  It didn't look like her to me.  And when I asked them to provide the provenance, they sent me a page from an auction house catalog they bought it from merely claiming the image to be Hodgers based on a resemblance to this photo:

 

 

 

So, there was no information about who had previously owned the photo and no reasoning behind the identification other than a mere resemblance to another picture.  Therefore, I ended up not even using it and no longer even have it.  I do still have the copy of the provenance they sent.  And no, they didn't charge me when I expressed my reservations and decision not to include it in my book based on the flimsy provenance.  Perhaps Mr. Luther should use the tool he developed to compare the images.  I don't think he even saw it.  I think he just simply believed the Gilder Lehrman Institute's claim that it was Hodgers.  Maybe the image is of Hodgers.  It would be exciting if it were.  But I didn't think so.  

 

The author brings up Rosetta Wakeman and this false photo connected to her.  

 

 

 

He attributes the mistake to a 2017 blog post.  But it actually goes back further than that - to 2014 when the book I Shall Be Near to You was released.  It is a work of fiction whose main character is a woman soldier named Rosetta, obviously inspired by the real Rosetta.  The book bears the image above on the cover.  So the author of the 2017 blog post likely saw the book cover and then falsely shared the image as a definitive identification of the real Wakeman.

 

Speaking of incorrect images of Wakeman, I saw this one a while back on a Find A Grave page for her:

 

 

 

 

Notice the individual in the picture is wearing sergeant's stripes.  Wakeman remained a private until her untimely death of disease.  I contacted the individual responsible for the entry and pointed out this discrepancy as proof that this soldier could not have been Wakeman. Thankfully, it was fixed.

Mr. Luther references the ubiquitous 400 figure as the number of women who served as soldiers during the Civil War. You can see a blog post I wrote about this here:  https://forbiddenhiddenforgotten.blogspot.com/2019/10/how-many-women-soldiers-were-there.html.

The author also brought up Jack Davis's book dealing with Loreta Velazquez. You can read my critical review of his work where I point out his assumptions, suppositions, and mistakes here: https://forbiddenhiddenforgotten.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-of-inventing-loreta-velazquez-by.html

 

Until next formation....rest.