Michael Santorelli
Sean Conway
FYSH
19 November 2013
Joe Manning
This past Tuesday, in place of our regularly scheduled FYSH class, we went to O’leary Library Mezzanine to listen to Joe Manning discuss his Lewis Hine Project. Through a pictoral history dating back to the early 20th century, and spanning almost a century itself, Manning was able to piece together history. That old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” applies perfectly here. Joe Manning took a look into history from the perspective of Lewis Hine, a photojournalist working to capture images of child laborers working in textile mills. Manning is an excellent example of how knowledge and determination can lead to incredible discoveries.
In 2005, Joe Manning was approached by a friend of his who had just finished writing a novel about a girl who worked in a textile mill. The photograph she used on the cover of this novel was that of a 12 year old mill girl, from the year 1910. However, this is all the information that was known about this particular girl. So, Elizabeth Winthrop, the author of the novel, commissioned Manning to see what he could find out about this girl. His results were astonishing. Not only did he find records of the girl, named Addie from the 1920 census, but through some tough, in depth research, he located her granddaughter and found contact with her. Manning was thrilled with the results, got in touch with the granddaughter, and pieced together a history of Addie, sharing what he knew with what she knew, and filling in the gaps. Manning’s extensive research into the work of Lewis Hine has lead hi, far beyond the story of Addie from the Lowell Mills.
To date, Joe Manning has used similar tactics to identify over three hundred people from a multitude of Lewis Hine’s photographs. From the Library of Congress, he got his hands on many photographs from Hine’s projects, and was able to identify people through the census, birth, death, and marriage records, and through relating photographs to other photographs. The most astonishing part of Manning’s work comes after he identifies the people in the photographs. His fascination with his own work lead him to meet the descendants of many of the children in the old photographs. Not only has he pieced together hundreds of stories from photographs for his own records, but he has also helped hundreds of families piece together missing parts of their family trees. From what Manning said, for many families, this was the first time many of them had even seen these pictures. In some cases, they didn’t even know about the history of their ancestors and their work in the mills.
The most interesting part of Joe Manning’s presentation was simply his drive, his eagerness to learn as much as he could. He put a lot of time and effort into decoding as much as he could about a photograph. In many of the cases, how would you even know where to start? Much of his work was through digital databases, libraries, and town halls, anywhere he could find the records of the person he believed was in the pictures. Manning was driven by an dissatisfaction of the history of the events depicted. He reasoned that if he couldn’t connect the events with real people, then the history itself didn’t make much sense. The way he put it, he wanted to put an identity on the people captured for a split second in the history books.
The most inspiring part, is Manning’s plans for the future. Although he does all of his research on his own time, at his own expense, he says what he gains from the experience is what makes it all worth it. As an author, he plans to put all of this work into a book, showcasing not only his findings, but his passion for this line of work. Joe Manning is in this for the rewarding feeling of satisfying a descendant of these people captured in the photographs.
