This morning I noticed a post on my Descendants of Charlotte Turley Bushman Facebook page with this photo.  I stared in disbelief.  I was looking into the face of Theodore Turley, my 3rd Great Grandpa!  My heart started to pound as I studied his face and his hand.  We have been searching for an original photograph of Theodore for years.  A Turley cousin of mine named David Turley, son of David Turley, son of Richard Eyring Turley Sr. noticed a cropped version of this Theodore Turley photograph on Find-a-Grave a few weeks ago.  The image was better than anything we have seen to date, so he immediately wrote to Mike Melville, a descendant of Amasa Lyman, who had uploaded the photo to FAG.  Theodore’s daughter, Priscilla was married to Amasa Lyman.  This photo was found in the Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum in Fillmore, Utah.  It was part of a collection of 1200+ historical photos that had not been digitized until recently.

After contacting the museum, Shauna Johnson, a Park Ranger aide, was able to remove the frame which had cropped the image, and digitized the full image you see above.  This is the earliest version of a photo of Theodore we have ever seen.  I just talked to my cousin, Rick Turley, who told me he thinks the photo was probably taken in the last 2 years of Theodore’s life, around 1870.  The photo album belonged to Frances Lyman, Amasa’s son.  He would have grown up knowing Theodore and would have been with him in San Bernardino when their families started that settlement in the mid 1850s.

Below is the photo as it was posted on Find-a-Grave:

Here is the best photo we had before this discovery:

I love looking at Theodore’s blacksmithing hand and his whiskers.  Theodore died in 1871 of cancer of the mouth.  What a thrilling thing to see a bit more of him today.

Here is the Amasa Lyman photo album that held this photograph: