Infant photograph of Amy Perry FitzSimons, 1888
Book 2, Page 38 ·1888
Transcription
A single mounted cabinet photograph of a small child (perhaps eighteen months old), in a long white gown and dark button-up shoes, seated on a chair draped with patterned fabric. The photograph is faded sepia.
Caption in blue ink beneath the photograph, in the compiler’s hand:
Amy Perry Fitz Simons — daughter of Samuel Gaillard Fitz Simons & Mary Anne Fitz Simons — Born February 4th — 1888 at her grand- mother Fitz Simons home on Greenhill Street in Charleston, S.C. — I was christened in St. Phillips Church in Charleston, S.C.
AI Notes
An album page (lined paper) with a single mounted cabinet photograph of a small child — the compiler herself — seated on a chair draped with patterned fabric, in a long white gown and dark button-up shoes. Beneath the photograph, in five lines of blue ink in the compiler’s later hand, the caption records her birth: born 4 February 1888 at her grandmother FitzSimons’s home on Greenhill Street in Charleston, S.C., christened in St. Phillip’s Church. The closing line shifts into the first person (‘I was christened .’). [caption confirmed; one tiny clarification — the writer renders her mother’s name ‘Mary Anne’ on the caption (the family-tree canonical form), while she appears as ‘Mary Ann’ or ‘Minnie’ elsewhere.]
St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on Church Street is the oldest religious congregation in South Carolina (founded 1681); its current building dates to 1835–38 after the previous church burned. The compiler — the album’s author — was christened there on 4 February 1888, locating her infancy at the heart of Charleston’s antebellum Anglican gentry world even as her family fortunes were two decades into post-Civil War contraction.