This is another photo from Oklahoma, a more cosmopolitan middle American family that I can date to 1895 with greater confidence than the most recent posting.
If you have nothing better to do with your life, you can entertain yourself looking at antique photos and trying to figure out relationships (yeah, I know, it’s enough to keep track of your own extended multigenerational family, never mind adopting beat up old photos of complete strangers from a century ago). If they are a single family, then there are eleven children with father, mother and in-law, but I think more likely the young woman and younger children may be one generation and the men may be younger brothers of the seated parents.
Note that the three little boys all wear the same cut and pattern shirt, the two girls another. Mother has a good humored visage, but the young woman gives us a haunted expression that is utterly devastating (I feel like asking, “What? What did I do!”); on the other hand, if by some inexplicable chance she is married, or even betrothed, to one of the characters on the back row, that would explain it! I don’t even want to think about that.
But wait, maybe she had planned to go for a ride with her sweetheart but Mom said she had to stay for the family photo, “You wouldn’t want to miss being in the family picture now, would you dear?”
No wonder nobody likes photographers (if the expression on the face of the seated daughter’s face is any indication, this one must have had two heads).