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| [a] Constance DHS |
Sarah Conn, today’s Guest Contributor on Round and Square, is a self-proclaimed “gal from rural Wisconsin” with a B.A. in Japanese Language and Culture and a double-minor in Museum Studies and Anthropology. With a mild obsession for Japanese textiles and working knowledge of the order Cetacea and the family Pinnipedia, she is currently working with four other Beloit College graduates to digitize, process, and research the William Edgar Geil Collection at the Doylestown Historical Society in Pennsylvania. She and Geil do not always see eye-to-eye on certain subjects, but both share a love of photography, writing about food, and USING ALL CAPITALS WHEN THEY ARE EXCITED.
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| [b] Sunset DHS |
Please
note that all items marked "DHS" are property of the Doylestown
Historical Society, and used with DHS permission. If you wish to use an
image, you need permission of the Society. Please contact Robert LaFleur
(lafleur@beloit.edu), and he will put you in contact with the
appropriate people.
Constance Geil is a fascinating mystery. Despite being quite active in various missions and committees, I have only been able to find a couple of things about her—and of those, precious few that refer to her independent of Geil.
In the book Woman’s Who’s who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, she is listed as the President of the Synodical Society of Home Missions, as well as “much interested in civic work of Women’s Clubs; interested chiefly in missions at home and abroad. Favors women suffrage,” before listing her interests as golf, walking and her women’s club. It’s far from the smallest paragraph in the book, but it is also far from the largest.
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| [c] Camping DHS |
But who is Constance Geil? How did the daughter of an oil baron end up marrying a traveling evangelist?
Born in 1873 as Constance Emerson, Constance married Geil at the age of 38, unusual for a woman of her time. However they appeared to live happily together and she and Geil traveled around the world together.
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| [d] Constance in bloomers DHS |
Geil is well-known (at least on this blog) for his writing, lecturing, and photography, but before today, I had no idea that Constance had a photography hobby as well.
How do we know this? Well, we’ve just come upon an unnamed, unmarked photo album and we think it was created by Constance Geil.
This judgment is based off the fact that most of these photographs are of young women, and only a few of them feature Constance Geil. I suppose that she suffers from the problem that most photographers have in which they feature less prominently in photographs because they’re ones behind the camera. In the album itself, there are a variety of camping images as well as portraits, all seemingly taken at the same time. There are also some somewhat scandalous images going around—from ladies in swimsuits and bloomers…to one girl showing some leg!
Well, we don’t really know Constance Geil yet, but from what I see, she seems to like having fun!
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| [e] Scandalous DHS |
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