Ambrotype of my great-great-great-uncles, Ephraim R. Jones and John Quincy Adams Jones, about 1858-1860 in Illinois. I am descended from their brother, Martin Van Buren Jones, who went to northern California via the Oregon trail in 1852. Ephraim was an early-day portrait photographer (Jones and Hover Studio, Jacksonville, Illinois) and was, according to family lore, for a while a traveling fiddler and dancing master. He came to the northern California coast town of Crescent City to visit Martin and his family and probably brought this and my other Jones family ambrotypes with him, and I have inherited them. John Quincy Adams Jones was a young lawyer in Havana, Illinois with a promising career ahead of him when he enlisted as a Lieutenant in Company K, 17th Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry in 1861, and was killed in the battle of Fredericktown, Missouri on Oct. 24, 1861. View full size.