Old German Military Portrait - An Amazing Identification

My cousin called me a couple of weeks ago saying he was in contact with someone descended from Ferdinand Panther and Amelia Traub. He said this man had some old photos I might be interested in getting a scan of. He texted me photos he took of a few of them with his phone.

I called the man, who lives in Mediapolis, Iowa, which is near Sperry and Dodgeville, where my Panther ancestors settled when they came to America. My cousin gave him a copy of my Panther family history book. Chatting with him, it ends up he is not blood-related to us. He is a descendant of the brother of the husband of a daughter of Ferdinand Panther.

Newly Discovered Granduncle

A distant cousin sent me the death announcement (found on Warsaw, Illinois newspapers online) for a granduncle I didn't know existed. He was the brother of my grandmother, Julia Doran Miller. Previously, I had found an indexed record, not an image, of the birth of a child of Thomas and Mary Ann Kelly Doran. In this indexed record found on Family Search, it didn't contain an exact birth date, a name, or even a gender for the baby. This baby was born in Bloomfield, Davis County, Iowa, in 1884.