A Peek at Family Trees, Records & Registers

Like many people, I enjoy researching my family history, exploring my genealogy and collecting interesting facts, images, and records. As you can imagine, I sometimes come across visual materials in my work that make me think about my hobby.  In our collections, we have many examples of commercially printed and sold family trees, records and registers. They were printed with empty spaces so your family members’ names, dates and other details could be added in. This wonderful family tree from 1888 was one of the first that caught my attention while searching in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. The tree itself – or the apples, more specifically – contain positive characteristics such as Politeness, Honor, Charity and Patience. In…

Red Cross Posters and Tableaux Vivants

When looking for images of winter warmth and light for a recent Flickr album, I went off on a searching tangent and happened upon a group of photographs that piqued my interest. All the photos, from the Harris & Ewing Collection, date from 1917 (though contemporary newspaper coverage dates the event in the photos to 1918) and share the same title: “Red Cross Demonstration with Tableaux, on south front of Treasury.” As soon as I looked closely at the photos I got very excited. I work with the Library’s poster collection and realized that the images depicted recreations with live models of Red Cross World War I posters! Also known as tableaux vivants, these recreations were a popular form of…

Photos on Ice

The Winter Olympics are in full swing and many are tuning in to watch the figure skating competition, which prompted me to look back into our collections for images of ice skating from years past. I particularly enjoy the photos of Washingtonians enjoying ice skating on the Reflecting Pool, which stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It became an unofficial ice rink for locals in the early part of the 20th century whenever it froze solid enough. (Skating on the Reflecting Pool is no longer permitted, so these older photos give us the best glimpse of this past experience.) This photo from almost exactly 100 years ago caught my attention, as it evoked my favorite sport on…

African Americans in the Military: In Pictures

Images from the Prints & Photographs Division’s collections help to illustrate the sustained contributions of Black Americans to the United States through military service over the course of the nation’s history. We hope you can join us for one of two “Finding Pictures: African Americans in the Military” webinar sessions this month (details at the bottom of the post), where we will show you a range of sample images from the collections, and provide some tips for searching our online catalog to find more. The images below are a small selection representing the kinds of images we will discuss. Nearly 200,000 Black Americans fought in the American Civil War. The image below shows Sergeant Major William L. Henderson and Hospital…