Mystery Monday: Ida, I Don’t Know

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I am in possession of a number of old photos from my father’s side of the family. I put many of these into a scrapbook when I first got into genealogy several years ago. At the time, I didn’t know much about older types of photos and fashion through the years. Now that I do, I’m starting to second-guess some assumptions that I made way back when.

Case in point: my father’s mother Ida Corley. I always assumed that the wedding photo below was hers.

Ida was married to my grandfather in 1905. I do know that the undated photo below is her:

Compare:

The mouths are the same. The eyes and hair seem very similar. Even the noses, though the one on the left may be a bit narrower and longer…

There are two other photos to consider:

The top photo, I believe, is the same woman in the wedding dress. She is definitely not the stylish woman in the bottom photo, whom I know to be Ida in the 1920s.

I doubt that stylish Ida reverted to granny wear as she got older (with apologies to whomever is pictured on the left; I’m assuming it’s actually Ida’s mother, Martha Alcorn SIMPSON). The thing that clinches the fact that these are two different women for me is that one is wearing glasses and the other is not.

You can barely tell that the bride on the left is wearing glasses — you can see the pince-nez on the bridge of her nose though.

I think that if the person pictured in all four photos were the same woman, she would either not be wearing glasses in all of the photos or she would have them on in all four photos. If you’re self-conscious enough about wearing glasses to take them off for seated portraits, you’d especially take them off for your wedding picture. That’s assuming Ida ever wore glasses, and all evidence seems to point to the fact that she did not.

Given that there is such a strong resemblance between the women pictured though, I’m going to assume that the woman in the wedding dress is Ida’s mother. Now, I just need to find more information about her wedding and possibly other photos of her to prove it.

My next question is, might the earlier photo of Ida be her wedding portrait?