Rebecca’s mind raced through possibilities. Adoption, but interracial adoption by a Black family in Georgia in 1897 would have been virtually impossible and certainly dangerous. A neighbor’s child included for some reason, but why would a formal and expensive studio portrait include someone else’s child positioned so intimately in the mother’s arms? A photographic error? 2 separate sittings somehow combined? No. The positioning, lighting, and focus were too exact.
She saved the file and marked it for priority research. Whatever the photograph was, it was not routine. It was a puzzle that had apparently stumped everyone who had seen it for more than a century, and Rebecca Torres intended to solve it.
The photograph itself had almost no identifying information. The studio mark in the bottom corner read Jay Morrison and Sons Photographers, Atlanta, a well-known establishment that operated between 1885 and 1903. The clothing styles and photographic paper suggested a date between 1895 and 1899. There were no names, no written notations, and nothing to identify the family.
Rebecca contacted the estate executor who had donated the collection. The photographs had belonged to Ernest Whitfield, a retired pharmacist who had spent 4 decades collecting African American historical materials before his death at age 93.
“Uncle Ernest never cataloged most of it properly,” his niece explained during their phone conversation. “He just collected whatever he could find. He always said too much Black history was being destroyed or thrown away, so he saved everything he could get his hands on.”
Rebecca asked whether any documents, correspondence, or records might identify the families in the photographs. The niece promised to search through the remaining boxes before the estate auction.
3 weeks later, a package arrived at Duke. Inside were a handwritten receipt, a studio appointment book, and a fragile envelope of customer correspondence. The receipt, dated October 12, 1897, listed: Washington family, 6 persons, formal sitting, 4 prints ordered, $8.50 paid in full. Washington was only a surname, with no first names.
