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.