John Vallely was a son of Michael Vallely and Mary Ryan. He was born in Lanark Co., Ontario in 1861, and emigrated to Grand Forks, North Dakota about 1882. In 1889 he married another Canadian emigrant to North Dakota: Anna Lillian (“Lila”) Moran (1861-1915), daughter of Alexander Michael Moran and Mary Ann Leavy.
This photograph comes from Clement A. Lounsberry’s North Dakota History and People: Outlines of American History, vol. 3 (Chicago: The S.J. Clark Pub. Co., 1917), which I discovered through a google search.
Local, regional, and state histories will often provide useful biographical information about prominent (male) citizens, and will occasionally even supply a photograph. The biographical coverage of such histories is typically skewed toward businessmen, politicians, and other local worthies, and is therefore extremely unrepresentative of the area’s population as a whole (no labourers; no humble farmers; and almost no women).
