However, based on several letters and daguerreotypes it is relatively certain that his father, Richard D. Hopewell, was excited by the prospect of photography—so much so that he became a traveling photographer who circulated primarily through New York and New Jersey taking portraits in the towns he visited.
In a letter dated November 15, 1851, Hopewell writes to his fiancé, Margaret Beecher, about some of what he saw at the exhibition: Of all the wonders I have seen, not the least is Mr. Bakewell's facsimile machine.
It is thought by some that the trauma of this event is what caused him to withdraw from the world and reacquaint himself with the facsimile machine; this claim is supported by the hiring of a young local girl, also named Margaret, to care for Maggie.
McCallister cites a journal entry of Richard's in support of this claim: I was much saddened by my father's absence at my recent wedding to Margaret.
It is clear from a very involved correspondence between Margaret and her mother that any final traces of the man that was Jacob disappeared completely after the death of his son.
He was totally and completely obsessed with modifying a facsimile machine so as to be able to send images of his daughter Maggie and grandson, Richard—born the day his father was killed in battle—to the dead Margaret and Richard.
In fact, its material reality is still widely contested by a number of scholars today (a theory first proposed by Michael Winterbarton in 1996).
For the next year (until he died) Jacob III placed a photograph from every family function he could find, probably in hopes that somehow the power of the machine would exist in the remaining object and that his dead son would be able to see all he had missed.
However, years later, when the birdhouse was rediscovered, photographs from multiple families were found inside, implying that others in the community, made desperate by the loss of their loved ones, were willing to suspend disbelief in the hope of being able to communicate with the dead.
In a letter written just before his death, Jacob III stated explicitly that: Regardless of the belief of subsequent generations, on no account are any of the images to be removed from the impromptu reliquary.
[4] Due to the words of Jacob III, today when scholars write of Hopewell's relic they mean not only the small wooden component of the original mechanism, but also all of the accompanying photographs.