I believe this lovely lady to be posing for her wedding portrait, based on the lovely flowers adorning her bodice. Her position in the Dobb Long Book is directly below Mr. Mysterious, so perhaps they were both sitting for their wedding portrait. She has a rather interesting turn to the pouf of her bangs, and such prodigious bangs they are. They must have been the inspiration for whatever it was we were doing with our hair in the 1980s! Her dress is satin brocade, and I am picturing it in deep red hues.
Hartley has been used by this family a couple times now. On my previous post I linked over to another website showing the back of a Hartley cabinet card that had even more text than this one. Given that this photo also has a bit of a lilac tint to it, I will date this to 1895.
Who Were They? 
So many photos from about the same years – 1885-1895… and not one of them labeled… so sad.
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I wonder her hair almost looks too perfect..was it a hairpiece? I know they were popular. At the least she has some type of foreign object under that pouf of hair to make it stand up all uniform like that.
She seems on the old side to be getting married..of course it could have been a second marriage:)
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It is probably a “rat” which was a little pad of hair and used to pad and shape the hair style. If you have ever seen a little dish on your mother’s or grandmother’s vanity that has a small hole in the top, that is a hair receiver. The stray hairs found after brushing and combing were collected in the hair receiver, then sewn into rats. That way they could be assured the rats would match their hair. Of course, false pieces were available in Sears Roebuck and other catalogs. Most hair receivers became bobby pin holders after rats became passe.
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