Figure 1.--This 1890s cabinet card portraigt shiows three unidentified Pittsburgh children. It is impossible toidentify the children with any surity. The child in the middle wearing a Fauntleroy suit is defiuitely a boy. We think the older children are girls because of the low necklines. Boys in the mid-19th century might wear low-necline blouses or dresses. This was not very common in the 1890s.

The children's hair styles are an important issue in assessing many old photographs which are often unidentified. The gender of the children is often obvious, but as younger boys in the 19th and early 20th century might wear dresses, assessing the hair style become important in assessing gender. One factor is the hair part. Many boys wore bangs or other styles without disernable parts. When parts are discernable, left parts seem the most common. We notice that many girls seem to have center or right parts. This is our initial assessment and it needs to be confirmed. Here there are differences over time and among counties. Here we need to develop more information on these trends. We note numerous photographs of boys with long hair during the late-19th and early-20th cebtury. Thus hair can be very confusing when assessing gender. One useful guideline is that in school potraits we believe that virtually all of the children with long hair are girls. What we often are confused about is all the girls with short hair. This became even more common after World War I in the 1920s when girls began bobing their hair (1914-18) By this time, however, it was becoming much less common for younger boys to weear dresses.

Created: 7:05 AM 10/2/2022
Last updated: 7:05 AM 10/2/2022