A 'new' picture of Charles T Russell and his wife, Maria

Photographs of Maria Russell are hard to find. There is one undated and one from c. 1894 with her husband, Charles. Then there is a line drawing from a 1906 newspaper during a court hearing. From the Pittsburgh Press for April 26, 1906:

And – while you cannot recognise her – in one of the funeral pictures for CTR she is pictured wearing a long dark veil, according to the identification made in the St Paul Enterprise newspaper. There are two heavily veiled ladies in the photograph and the other is likely her sister Emma.

From the description by William Abbott in the funeral number of the St Paul Enterprise newspaper for November 14, 1916:

But returning to a recognisable picture of Maria, there is another example from what will already be a well known photograph. Most will be familiar with the group photograph of the first main Watch Tower Convention held in Chicago in 1893. It was reproduced in the Chicago City Temple brochure in 1914.

Most copies in circulation have low definition so are not easy to examine that closely. One usually looks at the bottom right hand corner where you can see Rose Ball and Ernest Henninges sitting next to each other on the grass, a couple of years before their marriage. But in the middle of the picture, as one would expect, is CTR. And next to him we must assume is Maria. Maria had a very high profile at this time, and would no doubt have gone to Chicago because that was where her brother, Lemuel, lived.

I am grateful to Bernhard who has superimposed our known photographs of CTR and Maria from this era, next to the selective enlargement from a better quality print than is normally seen.

First there is the portrait of CTR. Compared with another photograph from the same era, while he appears a little thinner in the face from this angle; it is obviously the same person.

Then there is the portrait of Maria, compared with the two known portraits of her mentioned above. There are some superimposed lines between the pictures to show the similarities in features.

From this evidence I believe we can safely assume that it really was Maria in the 1893 group photograph.

So here is the ‘new’ photograph again.