Lost and Found

Radiators and mantlepieces. That's my answer. Whenever you've misplaced a photo, where should you look?   Radiators and mantlepieces. And maybe refrigerators too.  Look above, inside, underneath, and behind. Where the dust mites and spiders hide. That is where lost photos go.

This weekend, the photograph theme for Sepia Saturday is a young girl, no doubt a domestic servant, pushing a baby in a wicker pram along a parkway in Vienna sometime in the pre-WW1 era.  It happens that I have photos that are a perfect fit, but in a departure from my usual topic, these are not musical. 





Instead my theme is photographs lost and found. You see, I live in an antique house. circa 1913-14, that has been the residence of several families over the last 100 years. Its generous size with 4 levels offers many secret places where small things may disappear. When we first moved here, a failure to check all the doors led us  to discover an entire extra bathroom we had never seen before. But any vintage house requires constant maintenance and this one has been a never ending labor to re-finish and restore. At times that effort has made me an archeologist collecting the shards of a ancient people. Who lived here? What did they do? What were they thinking when they did this?

One artifact is  this first photo of two babes in a push carriage. Twins I think, but brothers or sisters I really can't say. They were found behind and underneath a radiator when I refinished an old floor.

The back of the photo shows it is a cut-down postcard, and someone has added a note.

Picture made while your
mother was wheeling you on
Bonnycastle Ave. near
Chichester Ave,
the year you moved
to L - from Lexington.
I think it was in 1912 or 1913.

No names. No other clues.







Nearby in the cobwebs was a marble, a couple of domino pieces, some paper clips, a pen cap, and a second small photo. This one has no note, but I believe is is the same baby carriage with the same twins, only a few months younger, so perhaps 1911. 

They are on a porch, but it is not the porch on my house. In fact the streets named are not in my city.  So where is this  L -  town?

If you use Google maps, there is a fun but useful feature that lets Google make suggestions. When you type in Bonnycastle Ave., Lexington, KY does not come up, but Louisville, Kentucky does. And it also has a Chichester Ave. that intersects Bonnycastle.  So I may not know who these tots are, but I know where they are, and if you'd care to stroll the same streets as these two babes, you can see the Louisville neighborhood here in Google Streetview.



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As any photo sleuth might do, I have cruised these virtual streets looking for matching porch balusters, but alas, could not find any like these. There are similar columns, but of course this second earlier snapshot could be in Lexington instead of Louisville.

In any case, these few clues don't fit with the history of the first family that lived in my house. They came from Germany and their children were born after 1912. Several years ago, when I was remodeling our kitchen, I uncovered a monogrammed silver butter knife that had slipped behind a cabinet. Those engraved initials, and my curiosity, led me to build a genealogy of the house. Using the city library's collection of old city directories and news clippings, I could identify the several families that have lived here, put a name to their children, learn their businesses, determine their school and their religion. That small mark on the door frame of the main entrance to the house? A mezuzah, a prayer token attached to a Jewish home. That scrap piece of old packing crate bearing the stenciled name of a WW2 army officer? A future son-in-law, identified from names in an obituary. When little antiquities like this turn up, I save them, and they get included in the household shrine.

So these two may have come from another later family. A photo album left on the radiator, probably in the winter when the heat would loosen the glue affixing them on the page. Lost and now found.

The basement of my house covers the entire foundation. There are 4 rooms: a generous coal cellar with a small pile of unused coal remaining; a furnace room now running on  gas; a large laundry room with three cast iron sinks, and a small room once used as the lodging for a domestic servant.

The room was very roughly finished, and in the winter took warmth from only the exposed uninsulated radiator piping. But for some reason there was a simple mantlepiece attached to one wall even though there was no fireplace. During my renovation to convert the room into a workshop, I pulled it away from the wall and this small photo fell out from behind.

Who is she? I don't know. She may have been the housekeeper - the maid, or just a friend of someone who once lived in this room. But this is North Carolina, where Southern traditions and culture kept people in separate black and white worlds for many decades. This tiny photo-booth snap is a powerful reminder that there were other stories attached to this house that were not recorded in a city directory. Did she know the twins? Could she have pushed them on a stroll around Bonnycastle and Chichester?

I think the power of historical ephemera like these three photos comes from the frozen moment. What do we see? Stories and documents may describe and connect us in other ways to a history, especially to a specific place like my house, but they are always an interpretation. A photograph can often say so much more in an instant. And with these images, I can take some satisfaction in restoring what was once lost to something now found.

UPDATE:       Thanks to Brett's enthusiasm (see his comments below ˅) I decided to do a hunt from the other side for twins, i.e. rechecking the family names that I know are attached to this house.  Alas, I could not find any connection to Louisville or to Kentucky. Part of the problem is that their birth year of 1911-12 falls just after the 1910 census and by the next one in 1920 the haystack gets even higher for finding needles. 

But I did discover that I had overlooked a line in the 1930 Census and the first family who lived here had not one, but two domestic servants, a man and a woman, both black. Scott Hester and Nora Grayson. Nora was listed in the 1938 Asheville City Directory at this address, along with her husband Theodore Grayson, butler. And then I found both again in the new 1940 census, ages 35 and 31, occupations: cook and houseman.   So I may not have identities for the twins, but I can at last provide real characters for my own edition of Upstairs/Downstairs. The old enameled baking table on which Nora undoubtedly made many biscuits was still in the basement when we moved here. It is now back in daily use as the central countertop to the kitchen that I rebuilt a few years ago. 

And for additional trivia, while examining the draft card registrations and passport applications of the father and son who lived here from 1915 to 1952, I learned that Dad was only 5' 5" but his son was 6' 4½"! (the draft board was very exact)  By strange coincidence that is only ½" taller than my son.

These two fellows could hardly be mistaken for twins, but I feel this recent sepia photo makes a nice coda to my story this weekend. The fuzzy one on the left is myself standing with Alan Burnett, who Sepia Saturday regulars will recognize as our esteemed theme master and a wonderful writer and photographer on his own blog, News From Nowhere . On a trip to Britain last month, my wife and I were able to meet Alan at his home and I can wholeheartedly confirm his notion that friendship between bloggers works even better in the real time and space continuum. It's almost as if we had adjoining desks in the same newsroom or played next to each other in the same band. I look forward to future visits.

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