When an Amateur Historian Has a Good Day (Part 2)

… sometimes it actually does involve history. This morning at the museum I started a new scanning project — a little photo album, owner unknown, which seemed to date to roughly the era of World War I, going by the only two photos that were dated.

Some of the photos showed recognizable locations around Hobart; a few had handwritten captions underneath identifying the people in them by first name only, but the vast majority lacked any information about names, dates or locations … or so I thought when I started. I hadn't got very far in when, working on a photo that was coming loose from the page, I noticed a little scrap of paper stuck behind the photo. I pulled it out: it was a handwritten note giving the surname of one of the people in the photo, the month, the year and the location.

I checked the photo next to it. Same thing — a little handwritten description hidden behind the photo. Checked another few photos, found more hidden descriptions.

I don't dare to hope that they will all be identified. I can't work on it anymore until I get a nice pair of tweezers, because I'll already encountered one case where the photo was still stuck to the page well enough that I couldn't coax the little slip of paper out from behind it with just my fingers or a paper clip.

This is the kind of thing you always hope will happen and it never does, but this time it did.