Wonderful photo Reginald, there is so much that we can see going on. When I was a kid I used to think that no one smiled in the old days. I later learned that often the aperture of the camera would be seconds and any movement would cause a blur so subjects were asked to just have a straight face.
We can see two of the boys in the middle are a bit blurred, no doubt they had ants in the pants and couldn't sit still. 
The two boys in the front have their arms crossed, no doubt to keep them from wiggling too. The boy on the right looks like he's at his limit with this photography game. I wonder how many takes it took to get this shot?
If you are wondering why some of them appear to have dirty faces: if any of the faces were under-exposed and it wasn't possible to see their details, extra developing fluid was applied with a q-tip to bring out the contrast and this often left a dark or black face as we can see in the two boys on the right.
9 kids. Wow. Talk about a busy house!
