Wow! This 19th century photo looks ALMOST EXACTLY LIKE......

[pepperbear]

It's uncanny, like it's his great, great, great, great, great Grandfather.

[nuxvomica]

1. I assume you're talking Nicholas Cage

It is remarkable. There's a picture of U.S. Grant that looks just like talk-show legend Mike Douglas, and we get our paper at work from W.B. Mason. Each pack of paper bears the spitting image Matthew Broderick with a mustache.

[pepperbear]

3. bingo!

[MiddleFingerMom]

4. I just woke up from an unexpected nap and your last sentence...

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spitting image of Matthew Broderick with a mustache).
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Took me a while to figure out HOW to read that.
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[nuxvomica]

5. LOL. One of my most poorly worded posts ever

But at least we got some fun out of it anyway. :D

[Tom Ripley]

2. Bill Kristol looks like Alexander Hamilton if Hamilton had male pattern baldness

That really does look like Cage

[TuxedoKat]

6. I have an old photo

that looks exactly like Kurt Russell when he was younger. I've often wondered if it was a relation. If I can find it I'll try and post it here.

[Maccagirl]

7. Is there any way you can get that photo to Nicolas Cage?

I think it would freak him out.

[Demoiselle]

8. I just explored the Thanatos Archive...

My goodness, what a sad place! And yes, that's an amazing likeness.

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. I knew that paintings and photos have been done of deceased people, particularly children for

a long time. Still, it is very hard to view that gallery.

My dad had Polaroids taken of himself with my mom right after she died. I couldn't bear to look at them. Her being dead and my dad's unbearable grief.... Just... No. :cry:

[Demoiselle]

18. That must have been really hard for you..

My father wanted me to kiss my mother's face as she lay there in her coffin. He actually tried to push my head down.
I resisted, and I guess the fact that I'm writing about it all these years later means I'm still rather upset about it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

19. Mine insisted we gather around her one last time at the funeral home before she was cremated, But

I would have freaked if he'd tried to get me to kiss her.

It was all I could do to go see Dad in the cold room where they had put him after he died too. He was so small and vulnerable; not at all how I wanted to remember him. *sigh*

[Xithras]

15. So depressing. So many children.

In our modern society we tend to forget that child mortality rate in early America was around 1 in 3 (death before 16), and on the frontiers could be as high as 1 in 2.

The overwhelming majority of American mothers buried at least one of their children before adulthood. Many buried more than one. That's almost inconceivable to us nowadays.

That said, the photo of the posed little boy holding his dead baby brother was rather demented in any era. What the hell were they thinking?1?!

[GreenPartyVoter]

20. I went through their site, and then through a lot of the forum. Far more pictures there. There were

several pictures of siblings posed with their dead baby brother or sister. More than I had expected.

Apparently there are a lot of people who collect vintage post-mortem photos, and they can go for quite a bit of money. I'm torn between being sad that the dead are collectors' items, and intrigued by all the questions. Who was this person in life? How did they live? What happened to them? Were they well-loved in the time they were here? Pretty much the same thoughts I have when wandering through cemeteries, but this takes it so much further than that.

[Arugula Latte]

9. That is just uncanny.

:wow:

[LibDemAlways]

10. There was a Russian photographer who experimented with

color back in the early 1900's. He photographed lots of scenes in and around Russia including a shot of 3 peasant girls taken in 1909. One of the girls is an absolute ringer for my daughter. It's uncanny and creeps me out every time I look at it. This seems to be the same sort of coincidence.

[pepperbear]

13. Funny you should mention that I found this series several days ago...

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

[LibDemAlways]

16. Yes, that is the collection. Aren't those photos interesting?

The pic of the girl who might as well be my daughter's identical twin is at this link:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/prokc.21043/

She's the girl in the center.

[pepperbear]

17. they all look like they could have been taken last week. n/t

[Brigid]

11. Wow!

The man in the photo really does look like Cage. I once saw a photo of a Civil War soldier who was a dead ringer for Harrison Ford.

[Fire Walk With Me]

14. Where's my fudgesicle? Or would that be "Ye Olde Fudgesickle"?