Oliver Bancroft Picture

This is a picture found in my father's collection of old pictures.  On the back is "Jim and I wonder who is this?" in one hand, and in a second hand, my father's:  "Per. Aunt Etta -- Minnie or Nellie."  The former hand is probably by Esther Bennie Brock Aspinall, wife of James Banderoff Aspinall II (son of Henrietta Bancroft Aspinall).  "Aunt Etta" is Henrietta.  On earlier versions of this page, I offered several theories of who these people might be by working with the clues on the back.  But I now think they hadn't a clue.  Recent research (Sep 2005) has caused me to be more confident of their identity.

I believe that this is a picture of Oliver Bancroft (left, my 2nd great grandfather), his son Christopher, Christopher's wife Sarah and their son Walter. 

In addition to my great-grandfather Llewellyn, Oliver had a son Christopher and a grandson Walter.  My father remembers that, as a child, there was a relative, Walter Bancroft, who lived near his grandparents in Buffalo, NY.  He remembers this Walter as a bricklayer, but could not remember the exact relationship.

According to the 1901 English census, Walter was born about 1882 and was a "brickfitter."  Christopher and Sarah also had sons born about 1885 to 1892; therefore the picture was probably taken before their births.  Oliver was living alone by the 1891 census (census evidence suggests that Oliver and his wife Margaret may have become estranged by then, which may explain why she was not in the picture.)  Walter appears to be about 3, suggesting that the picture was taken about 1885.  Am I imagining that Sarah appears pregnant? 

Walter immigrated to Buffalo in 1907; his then wife Alice immigrated in 1908 with their daughter Melinda.  My father was born in 1910.  In 1910, Walter and family are living a few blocks from the Llewellyn Bancroft family in Buffalo; he was a bricklayer.  I have not found Walter in the 1920 census;  but by 1930, Walter appears to have been living in Wells, Bradford County, Pennsylvania; his first Alice is probably deceased, as Walter has remarried.

The photograph likely came into my father's procession through his mother Margaret Bancroft Deitz.  Margaret and Walter would have been first cousins.