I am a long-time lurker who has never posted on Net54, and I am not an expert, but as the moderator of a baseball photo forum I have spent a great deal of time collecting, cataloging and identifying baseball photos. Having read the entire supplement and all of the messages in this thread, I finally feel compelled to speak up.
My personal opinion is that the subject in the Dag is not Cartwright.
To the issue of provenance, I would add that, IMHO, given the task to supply an artist with an image that will be used to memorialize my grandfather's legacy with a bronze plaque, I would try to select the most iconic photo I had. The other images I have seen of AJC are decidedly less-iconic than the image in question. In a ca. 1855 two-person image he looks respectable but not legendary, in a ca. 1860 three-person image he looks tired, and in the others I have he is a much older man. The strong-chinned, steely-eyed subject in the Dag certainly looks more legendary than any AJC image I have, and in the 1930s (as history proves out), who would question Bruce C. when he states that the image is his long-deceased grandfather?
I can also see how, as mentioned earlier in this thread, Bruce C. could have mistaken his grandfather for the other man. There is some resemblance, but as has been stated, family members (and, for that matter, even persons not related) may *appear* similar, but are not the same person. Another case in point--my grandfather and his two brothers were virtually indistinguishable separately. I knew my grandpa for the last 26 years of his life, but given the task of definitively identifying a man generally resembling my grandpa at a much younger age in a photograph showing a group of men I did not know, it would be impossible for me to categorically state whether the photo showed my grandpa, when it could easily have been one of his brothers.
T. Scott Brandon (tsb)