I opened another box of ephemera and found a few hundred 116 format negatives from 1907-1919. They show a woman, her husband, siblings, parents & her baby. They were packed in envelopes with Brooklyn, NY & Richmond, VA addresses and labeled for Jules & Edith Cowels.
Curious who these people were, I fired up my laptop and hit the Google search bar. Here’s what I found.
Edith Clark Cowels turned out to be a co-founder of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, was a kindergarten teacher, and a newspaper columnist who wrote on issues of education, civil rights and women’s suffrage. She never considered herself to be a feminist. However, she did believe that a democratic society should allow women the basic right to vote.
She lived much of her married life in Brooklyn, NY as a teacher. She moved back to Richmond in 1914 after apparently separating from her husband Jules Cowels. She died of a stoke at home in 1954.
Jules Cowels came from a prominent Connecticut family, and spent his married years as a businessman. In 1907 his family was hit hard by the 1907 national financial crisis. Jules accompanied his parents to Cuba to help with their fruit plantation as a managing superintendent. Edith stayed behind with her family in Richmond.
The separation proved to be too much for their marriage to withstand. A few years after Jules had returned to New York, the separated and Jules moved to Hollywood. He subsequently had a long carrier as a movie actor.
He died in Los Angeles on 22 May 1943.