Mysterious old ladies

 A couple of years ago, I bought a lot of vintage Actress cards when I was in Toledo. I finally picked the box they were in to scan this week, but this set is a tough one. There's no known year, it was a set issued across the 1880s and 1890s, and comes in multiple versions. Some of the cards are in less than perfect shape and I can't quite tell who appears on the cards. 

I have three different back versions, and the argument could be made that there's 4 versions because the backs are found both upright and upside down compared to the card front, with card of Frankie Raymond appearing with both directions. 

Here's a good example of the variations

I have a card of Arline Stanley with all three back designs that I have, although I suspect that there may be other back types I do not have present in my collection, since that's how they did it back in the day. 

I have been told the horizontal Sweet Caporal with Kinney Brothers back is rarer than the others. It seems likely true because in the lot I bought there were less of them, although that's a VERY small sample size and jumping to big conclusions. 

I've also been told that there are more than 2000 cards in the set, which would make it one if not the largest sets ever! There are also male actors in the set but none of them appear in the lot I found and purchased. I do not know what the full checklist is though. 

And that's a problem, because two of my cards are in poor enough shape that I can't read the names...and I'm hoping someone with more knowledge than me or a better researcher than I am can figure out who they were.

Well I had posted this one and could make out Mabel. Her last name looked like Santley when I blew it up on the blogger feature and I did a quick internet search- and that's exactly what her name is! In fact I found a closeup portrait of her from the same set in the Jefferson Burdick collection on the Met website and her face is definitely the same. One mystery down!

The next one is going to be much harder.

This card has been damaged sometime in the 120 years it existed before I got it. 

I've got Miss **way**g. I think. Did I mention that some of the cards don't include first names? These must have been household names in the 1880s-1890s, Now most have been forgotten, very few even have Wikipedia pages. For instance, I can't find anything on Arline Stanley, shown above, other than other cards that were issued for her. She actually has quite a few, including others using the same photograph. It seems likely that there is history for her out there somewhere, but I don't know how to find it. It seems many of these actresses, popular on stage before film even existed, left their biggest mark on history via their trading card issues.

New People May 2025

 May was a big month for cards. I don't know why exactly, but traditionally it's always one of the big three months when it comes to card stuff, along with September (when I traditionally go to Lake George) and December (Christmas). This May was no different. I got cards again, I got back to scanning, and the burn out I gave myself by scanning more than 2000 cards in January went away. I ended up scanning 1103 cards during May, which was a lot of work to upload because there were a LOT of new people scanned. I came across a box that had some baseball and football, but also had all of the 1992 US Olypicards I had and a big stack of half naked ladies. Almost all of the latter two needed to have albums created, and it was doubly challenging because a good portion of the ladies had no names printed on the front of the cards. 

To make this I had to take 4 screenshots and combine them! 

Of the 258 new people scanned, exactly 100 were the above mentioned ladies, among 102 non-sport people scanned in total. This months uploads brings me to 935 non-sport people scanned. That's actually down two over what it would have been because I was reading the backs of the cards as I scanned them and I realized two of the women in the sets were actually athletes and should have been in the Other Sports category, which I corrected. That was Gail Kim, a wrestler, and Mia St. John, a boxer. They now reside in Other Sports. 

Other categorical additions:

32 new football players

44 other sports

11 hockey

69 baseball

Interestingly enough I scanned more NBA cards than another other topic during May, but every single one of them were of people that had already been scanned. Auto racing only got a few cards scanned but they were all previously done as well.

Randomly oddball factoid: I do believe this is the first month ever where two people named Ivan got scanned for the first time. Ivan Robinson, a boxer, and Ivan Zweig, a baseballer. 

With May 1st being "Glad I'm Not Dead Day", which celebrates the anniversary of when I got my second chance at life after coming literally 5 minutes away from dying back in 2013, my family always gives me cards and I got quite a few in May because of same. Because I got some NBA cards, which have been very hard to come by here lately, I got quite a few new NBA players.

yes, I see the typo and have fixed Jonathan Mogbo's name after the post went live

but hockey was not left out either of course. Nick Perbix and Brett Leason were both from this year's OPC so both of them got scanned. All the rest wait for the Heystack machine. Another fun factoid: Devin Cooley is the only NHL player known to have a pet rabbit. 

Yet another fun fact: Despite now being over 18,000 different people, these are the first people in my collection named Filipowski, Leason, Mogbo, Perbix, Salaun or Scheierman.