We don't know who these two men are for sure

This was reported to be a picture of Thomas Morgan and his younger brother Joseph who came to America two years earlier than Thomas and brought Thomas' 11 year old son Edward with him. We know that Thomas went directly to his brother Joseph's place in Utah when he and the rest of his family arrived. It is possible that this picture was taken during the first few days after the reunion of Thomas and his brother in Utah in October, 1855.

We were not able to locate the source of the above information or confirm the identities of the men in the picture and we couldn't confirm that the information we had about it was correct. So we put the picture aside for a time while the Morgan family history work progressed.

And then in the summer of 2002 an original of this picture was found in a collection of Morgan and Radford pictures in Idaho. The woman who owns the picture thought at least one of the men was a Radford. It dawned on us that this picture would not continue to appear in Morgan/Radford Family picture collections if it were not a picture of a family member. So we are working on it once again, trying to identify the time, the place, and the men.

The Thomas Morgan and John Whitlock Radford families were close and there was a good bit of intermarrying between the two families. Since an original of this photograph was found in a very good Morgan/Radford family picture collection, and good copies were found in several other Morgan and Radford family collections, we feel that the two men are Thomas Morgan and his brother Joseph Morgan, with the lesser possibility that they are Thomas Morgan and John Whitlock Radford.

After having worked with Morgan family pictures for ten years and with this picture for seven of those years, I am now convinced that the man seated in the picture is Thomas Morgan. And I believe the man standing is Thomas Morgan's younger brother who came to America first and brought Thomas Morgan's oldest son Edward Morgan with him. There are many things about this picture that lead me to this conclusion. This picture was found in several Morgan family picture collections and they were all originals (printed from the negative) still mounted on cardboard (Cabinet Photos). I recognize that people can get a mistaken indentification on a picture and then copies get passed around, perpetuating the error. But I have never seen this happen with originals. These originals were clearly made up to commemorate an event and then given to many family members. I think this event was the reunion of Thomas Morgan and his brother when Thomas and Ann arrived in Utah. The importance of this occasion explains why so many family members were given this picture and why so many of the pictures survived in Morgan collections.

In the course of the last ten years I have personally studied, scanned, and identified hundreds of pictures in Morgan family collections in Idaho, Utah, Montana, California, and Alberta Canada. I have probably seen nearly all of the Morgan/Radford/Ryset picture collections that are still in existence. I have also worked with picture collections from many other families, such as the Lovell Family, that were associated with our Morganclan. This Thomas Morgan and Joseph Morgan picture has never appeared in any other family collection. Which is telling in itself. Because we have had one William Thomas Morgan family picture show up in a Lovell collection that was incorrectly identified as a Lovell family. But we were able to correct this error because the picture is of my grandfather William Morgan's family and I knew William personally (I am now 74 years old-I've been around for a while). But this Thomas and Joseph Morgan picture has never shown up anywhere but in Morgan family collections and everyone I know who has an opinion on this picture agrees that Thomas Morgan is in the picture.

If you have any ideas about this picture that might help us with this picture, please contact us. We are now certain this is an important Morgan Family picture. But we are open to any evidence to the contrary that might surface.