Preface

When it comes to Victorian history, there are few surprises anymore. It was all written long ago, then thoroughly revisited before this Century began. The lies were dispensed with, the warm glow of nostalgia freeze-dried, the truth finally brandished like the flag of rebellion. BUT I FOUND THIS...

Some smart aleck thinks he has an idea. Facts are challenged and traditions ignored… and sacred cows heartlessly butchered like baby veal. But then, that is why we love history. Just when everything gets nailed down, controversy rips through our comfort zones like a straight-line wind. Relax. I don’t want to upset the applecart. But not too long ago, my decade-long search brought me to this GRAND SLAM (above)... and I believe it teaches us some things we did not know. I'll let you try to figure that out, and I will come back to that later.

But for now I’m going to have some fun. I’m calling myself “the DoppelCatcher,” my word for someone obsessed with faces, comparing them, yes, finding doppelgangers, and sharing them. That's our former president and commedian George Carlin. I'll let you figure out which is which.

I’ve been doing this for about a decade. Most of my spare time has been spent on this crazy quest, all because I discovered that I had a good eye for such things. Online auctions like Ebay made the hunt easy and profitable, since the world is full of unidentified photographs, and unappreciative persons who want to get rid of them. When I realized that I could spot an unrecognized doppelganger almost every day on the Internet, hunting them became my passion.

It’s Open Season, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. And it’s as easy a scrolling with your computer mouse. But then, you have to be willing to scroll past about a thousand unprepossessing mugs to find one. Like hunting that needle in the haystack. And your reward is that you have to buy the thing, and it might be expensive if the seller prized it for a completely unrelated reason. The reason is usually their nagging suspicion that the image is SOMEBODY, they just can’t place them.

Outlaw Pearl Hart, the "Last Stagecoach Robber," brandished her pistols on an old post card, but nobody seemed to recognize her on Ebay. But I did.

This was one of the very first dops I acquired, but after years of research, I decided it is just that, a doppelganger, dangit. I’ve been a hunter all of my life. First it was mice in my mother’s kitchen cabinet. Then I moved up to rabbits and squirrels. Later my cousin taught me how to “flounder,” a Texas and Gulf Coast tradition of gigging flounders at night by hunting them with a lantern. I’ve shot doves, ducks and deer, but none gave me the thrill of a great DOPPELGANGER! And every once in a while, one that might actually be a famous person out of history!