Ancestry Saturday: Are These The Same People?

A fellow researcher shared some of her collection of family photos, including several with a link to my kids' mom's side of the family.  There were no dates recorded on the photos and the person who labeled the names was two generations and multiple decades removed from the photographed.  So, while I'm grateful for the find, I'm mystified about what to do with them.

 

Both photos' occupants are identified as Henry Koldeway and Elizabeth Moeller Koldeway.  Though I can believe one photo is them, I'm having trouble believing both are of them.  Henry was her second husband after her husband William Disselbrede, my kids' third great grandfather, died in 1847.

 

 

Henry Koldeway (descendants call him Henry the 1st so as to not confuse him with his son, Henry) died in 1871.  I can believe that Henry managed to get in a photograph sometime before that, maybe a few years before he died at age 66.  I can believe that is him circa 1870 in the photo above.

 

Since I have another photo of Angela Elizabeth Moeller Koldeway, I can see a resemblance to the woman in the top photo too.

 

Henry and Elizabeth got married in 1848.  So, for the photo below to be of the two of them also, they would have had to have taken this photo about that time.  According to Wikipedia, the oldest surviving photograph of people, any people, is from 1838.  Thus, I'm tending to doubt that a German immigrant farmer from Southeast Wisconsin was posing only ten years later.

 

 

Plus, to be frank, they would have aged horribly over the intervening 23 years, at most, that would have spanned these two photos.

Notice the suit?  Looks like the same man's coat in both photos.  The background looks the same too.

 

Though, of course, you could explain that the man just happened to wear the same coat 20+ years later to his photo, I think it's more likely that these photos were taken closer in years together and by the same photographer who loaned out the coat.

 

Since these came from the same box of family photos, we are undoubtedly looking at people who are related in some way.  The same people though?  I think not.