T. M. Bradshaw Books

This summer I spent some time with my brother going through boxes of old pictures, most of them from before either of us were born. Mom and Dad were easy to recognize, but most of the other people were mysteries. Only one picture had anything written on the back, and what was written there was of no help to us. The photo was of a woman asleep on the grass and on the back it said “Eliza Rip Van Winkle.”Apparently, Eliza, whoever she was, took an extra long nap that day. Eliza featured in a number of outdoor, fun photos. But neither my brother nor I had ever heard of Eliza. Was she one of Mom’s friends? An early one of Uncle Joey’s numerous wives? We eventually decided that a man, also in a number of photos, including a few with Eliza, was Uncle Joey, someone I had never met. My brother, as a preteen, had met Joey, but it was years after those pictures were taken and people change.

We’re now in a world where everyone takes pictures of everyone and everything, including their lunch. Will all those pictures eventually prove to be someone else’s mystery? Will they be lost when the phone they’re on is lost or upgraded?

I think it would be helpful for people to print and maintain in an album representative pictures marked with names and dates—“Aunt Mary Smith, 1936” for example. And since people change, examples of those changes should be kept. Aunt Mary might have gained or lost a lot of weight or worn glasses sometimes and not others or was fond of changing her hair color.

Photos archived electronically should have their names—usually a string of letters and numbers indicating the device that produced it and the date—changed to something meaningful. You know who those people are and the occasion on which the picture was taken, but wouldn’t it be good to leave your grandkids a key to figure out the rest of the collection when they find it later?

Research—even into things you think you know well—often yields something new. The surprise may come through locating additional facts that may require reconsidering previously known data in a new way. Or it may be that the researcher herself has changed and understands things in a new way.

The pieces comes together like a puzzle, but a puzzle that doesn’t initially have all the pieces in the box; some are shipped later, sometimes years or even decades later.

I first found these photos in 1998 in the Stamford Library’s history collection and realized that Stamford used to have flower parades. The other realization was that both vehicles must have been in the same parade, based on the size of the sapling near the building’s farthest-back window. But when? And who?

Then, in 2018, while researching editor Leo DeSilva for The Newspapermen, I stumbled across this image (Leo is the young man in white shirt and tie):

Zooming in on the poster on the left we learn that the fourth annual floral parade was scheduled for September 2, 1911. So we know that the first one was in 1908.

Then in April 2023, while browsing digital archives of newspapers at Harpersfield Historical, I found descriptions of all the vehicles in the parade, including lists of the people riding in them. The car above belonged to an A. G. Reeves and was driven by his son Raymond, while the woman driving the carriage pulled by the white horse was a Mrs. J. E. Safford. The article also pinpointed the date—August 31, 1909—and an alternate name for the event: Coaching Parade.

But there was also a mention in an earlier paper of a coaching parade in Stamford in 1900, raising the question: Why was the 1908 parade called the first? That’s a question for which an answer may or may not pop up some day and that’s a big part of the fun—almost every answer to a question contains another question.