Here is another old-timey store photo find with a curious backstory that is not quite confirmed.

And the back, followed by a cropped version.

The writing on the back appears to have been written much later than the time of the photo, suggesting someone who knew something about this photo was trying to recollect details. You can also see that the main name, Chapman, was a correction likely added by even another person. It reads:

Isaac Benson Thronton Chapman in his

store, Columbus, Ohio.

c. 1895

A quick Ancestry search did reveal an Isaac Benson Chapman (1888-1952) in Columbus, Ohio. However, there was no indication that Isaac worked in a store. If indeed this is Isaac, the date of the photo would be more likely 1905-1910.

My Ancestry research led me to a Margaret Sumner, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the History Department at The Ohio State University. Though not related to the Chapman family, she has a special interest in them as a historian of the area. As such she created a tree on Ancestry with some of the bast facts which you can access here.

Here is a very lightly edited version of what Margaret shared:

Chapman originally came from Gallipolis, OH. His father, Isaac Floyd Chapman (1847-1905), was a Civil War veteran, a schoolteacher, a state assemblyman - and prominent Republican Party leader in his region (Gallia county). Isaac Floyd Chapman was also good friends with Ohio governor Joseph BENSON Foraker. So, we know where Isaac BENSON Chapman got his middle name. Little baby Isaac was born in 1888, a few years into Foraker's term as Ohio governor. 

As a young man, Isaac Benson Chapman moved to Columbus and worked his way up from bookkeeper to president of a wholesale grocery business in Columbus in the early 20th century. He married Elizabeth "Bessie" Corbett (1884-1970), a bookkeeper herself, who came from a large Irish Catholic farming family full of Democrats. 

The Chapman marriage of "Ben and Bessie," as they were called, was intensely "mixed" – immigrant vs. Ohio born, Catholic vs. Protestant, and Dem vs. GOP! When Ben died first in 1952, he was buried in a Catholic cemetery so he must have converted at some point. 

Years ago, an elderly neighbor who had distant memories of the Chapmans during the WWII years said they were "nice people.”

Some odd facts we found out searching for them in local papers:

Ben was a huge fan of fishing. Bessie had a sister, Kathryn Corbett, who ran her own dry goods shop up the street from our home. "Miss Corbett" was one the first women shop owners in the neighborhood. The Chapmans bought a little summer cottage on Buckeye Lake where Bessie threw "summer parties" and Ben presumably fished to his heart's content!

As for the "Thornton" connection, one of Chapman's sisters, Ruby, married a Thornton, so perhaps your photo came from her family's collection at one point?

Margaret was able to identify the canister on the counter was for “Tiger Chewing Tobacco”. This brand was popular from the 1890s until the early 1910s.

Margaret went on to speculate:

This is perhaps wishful thinking, but this could be young Isaac Benson Chapman, working in one of his first jobs as a cashier, sometime in the early 1900s AFTER his family moved to Columbus but before 1911 when he married Bessie and began working for Citizens Wholesale Supply Company where he would work until he retired.

In the 1910 census (you can see this on my ancestry tree) Chapman was 22 and living with his widowed mother on Wesley Street in downtown Columbus (long gone now.) 

His older sister Ruby and her husband, JM Thornton, a Kentucky born salesman, were living with them -- with their two kids, John and Mary.

Perhaps Ben is posing with his little nephew, John Leroy Thornton, who would have been around seven years old?

I guess we can only guess. . .  ?

She shared a drawing of Chapman from the Columbus Dispatch of January 14, 1930. Do you think it is the same person? As Margaret notes, “They share the same serious, long face!”

This is likely one of those photos that we will never know the true story of. In this post were are making some educated guesses on a photo that someone else had already made an educated guess about years ago. It is like a genealogy version of the game “Telephone”.

I am very grateful for the help of Margaret Sumner, Ph.D. on this post. Check out her bio, an article about her, and go buy her book: Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America.

And after you’ve done that go check out the growing gallery of old-timey store and occupational photographs!