Portrait of oldest Olsen children, Viggo, Anna, and Clara, mid-1860s

Who remembers this group portrait from Bano's?  Or Mom's apartment in the corner behind the palm tree?  Mom knew that one of the girls was Clara, her grandmother, but I only realized the identity of the others recently.  The portrait is done in charcoal in the mid-1860s of the three oldest children of George and Emily [Miller] Olsen.  The Danish-born couple had met and married in Memphis, TN in 1859 and moved to Chicago as the Civil War was starting. They seem to have been pretty prosperous from the start (portraits already!). And the children came quickly.  From left to right, the children are baby Viggo (b. 1863), their firstborn Anna (b. 1861), and 2nd daughter Clara Estella (b. 1862).  [Their sister, Dagmar, mentioned in the previous post, wasn't born till 1866.]

Clara died of the flu or grippe, at the age of 29, leaving her husband James B. Thorsen and their four children, Blanche (Bano), Alice, Mitchell, and George).  Two years later, James B. married a still younger Olsen sister, Florence (b. 1871), who had four more children and was "Grandmother Florence" to Nancy, Wally and Don (and some of my generation who remember her).

Anna Olsen (later Anna Grund) had several children all of whom Aunt Alice kept track of.  The one my sisters and I remember is "Aunt Elinor" [Grund] Reynolds.  Viggo we don't know much about at all (yet).  He married (Hattie) and had a daughter Harriet and made his living working in construction with his father.