Group at an estate

October 2023: When I shared this postcard portrait on the blog six and a half years ago, I was convinced that the group included Theodore Roosevelt in Rough Riders uniform with his niece, Eleanor, standing next to him.  I was never able to identify the other members of the group, despite looking at hundreds of Roosevelt family photos online.

The photo received very little attention for six years.  Then, in March of this year a fellow blogger with an interest in the Roosevelt family happened to see it.  He wrote to me that he felt certain that the man in uniform in my photo wasn’t Theodore.  He suggested that I contact someone with expertise in the Roosevelts who might be able to help me to identify the group.  I agreed with his suggestion but didn’t follow up on it, in part because I wasn’t sure who to contact.  After a few months, I noticed that the post was receiving more traffic than usual, and I decided that I couldn’t put off doing something about it any longer.

After poking around a bit online, I came across the website of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, North Dakota.  I reached out to the Center via their contact form and received a thoughtful reply the next morning with an in-depth analysis of my photo.  In short, the man in my photo isn’t Theodore Roosevelt and the young woman next to him almost certainly isn’t Eleanor.  A convincing argument against the man being Theodore is that his uniform is very different from Theodore’s, as you can see from this 1898 photo of Colonel Roosevelt in Rough Riders uniform on the Center’s website.

I’m a little disappointed, naturally, but I still find the photo very intriguing and I still hope very much to identify this group.