Uncle Charley's paternal grandmother.
Even better is it replaces the only copy we had that was destroyed in our 2016 house fire. Thankfully I had a fairly low resolution copy I had made of the photo before the fire which is what I had on ancestry.com.
Elizabeth Roberts Weltner Huls was born on January 3, 1843 and married my great-great-grandfather, Captain William Harrison Huls, on July 31, 1864. They had six children, starting with my great-grandfather Alpheus Eugene Huls.
A.E.'s son Charles Henry Huls was born in 1902, so she knew him before her death on January 7, 1904. (The paternal grandmother known by uncle Charley and grandpa Fred was Capt. Huls's second wife, Eliza Potter Binder Huls.)
Now in the past 20 years I have kept an ongoing search for family names, but the only name on this was the photography studio in our hometown.
Friends have asked me how her albumen cabinet card ended up on eBay. The answer is: who knows? She might have sent copies to friends or family. Since her name wasn't on it someone discarded it at some point. I'm just relieved it wasn't thrown away, someone listed it, and I happened to recognize her.
It does make me wonder about other missed opportunities that have possibly passed me by.
Finally, the eBay seller is from Kansas. My g-g-grandfather's widow, the second wife, moved to Kansas after his death. Did she take a box of photos with her? I shall probably never know.
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