“Help me find Edna’s family! – I discovered a thousand abandoned photographs of an unknown couple who traveled the world during the 1950s.”
In April 1958 Harry and Edna took a cruise from San Francisco to Hawaii on the SS Matsonia. In 2011, photographer Phillips found the above picture of the couple on deck in a stash of 1,000 Kodachrome slides found in a Chicago store. Jeff wanted to know more. He appealed for help on Facebook:
“Help me find Edna’s family! – I discovered a thousand abandoned photographs of an unknown couple who traveled the world during the 1950s.” he says. “Who are these people? Where are they now? Why were their family memories discarded?”
The search bore fruit, and led to the exhibition Lost and Found, The Search for Harry and Edna at the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Missouri.
As he writes:
“I devised a social media experiment to see how long it would take until someone would recognize their mother, father, grandmother, or brother. I began posting the unmarked photographs on Facebook. I created a page entitled Is This Your Mother? hoping that people would follow it. Before long, hundreds of people had Liked the page, ultimately combining forces to form a social media search party. Would it take five years to find the family of this couple? Ten years? I had serious doubts that they would they ever be found, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within three weeks, the mystery was solved. A band of amateur sleuths had successfully identified my enigmatic couple as Harry and Edna Grossman of St. Louis, Missouri.”
But did the family want to remember? Says Jeff:
“I sensed that the family just wanted to see them. Almost immediately, they became active participants in the reactivation of Harry and Edna’s memory. They were modern consumers of their own family photographs, curated by a stranger and delivered through Facebook, the very place where Harry and Edna were rediscovered.”
Marcia, a great niece, wrote in the family’s very first email to him:
Dear Jeff,
I am one of Harry & Edna’s Great Nieces. I received an e-mail … regarding the FB page. You have gone to great lengths to find our family and it is heartwarming and a little creepy (in a fun way) to see how interested others are in my Great Aunt and Uncle.
–Marcia
Harry August Grossmann and Edna Annette Lehr were married in St. Louis, Missouri in 1923. They had no children of their own. Edna lived until 1983, and Harry until 1986.
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