News - Local/State

Sunday, Jul. 22, 2007

Providing connection to the past

Historian helps local millworker discover ancestry through photos

CHESTER -- A worn photograph of a boy sits amid a pile of old pictures in Paul Love's Chester home.

Renowned photojournalist Lewis Hine once snapped the shot of Love's father, Archie, heading to work at Chester's Springsteen Mill in 1908. Archie Love was 14 at the time.

That image also rests in the Library of Congress, along with about 5,000 other Hine prints.

But Paul Love never knew his father's picture was there. He'd never heard of Lewis Hine or of his role in the child-labor movement. Not until a Massachusetts man called one day to tell him about the picture and the photographer.

That man is Joe Manning, a 65-year-old historian, author, and for the past year, the guy who tracks down families of the working children seen in Hine's photos.

The Lewis Hine Project, Manning said, is about telling the history of ordinary people and learning what happened to these children after Hine immortalized them in America's textile mills, coal mines, factories and other work sites.

Hine was hired in 1908 by the National Child Labor Committee, a progressive group that wanted to improve child-labor laws and bring more children into schools. Over the next nine years, Hine photographed children in about 20 states, often sneaking onto job sites because his exposés were not welcome.

He'd typically ask children a few quick questions and leave. Of the 5,000 Hine photos the Library of Congress possesses, Manning said only about 1,000 to 1,500 provide enough information for searching.

Tracking them down

So far, he has successfully followed the history of 45 children featured in Hine prints, talking to numerous descendants.

"I'm on a mission to tell people ... that their ancestor was tied up in history and that I hope that they get tremendous good out of seeing the pictures," Manning said.

Paul Love received his first e-mail from Manning on Jan. 18. The historian had tracked down the 72-year-old Love with the help of the Chester County Library, which found Archie Love's obituary.

Although he didn't know about Hine, Paul Love had the photo at his home. The Hine picture was among others that Paul's mother gave him shortly before his father died in 1973.

"She knew Dad and me were pretty close," Love said. "I treasure them."

Born in 1894, Archie Love was the second of four children. Their father died in 1900 after a sickness that had left him unable to provide for his family and forcing his mother to work in the mills.

Archie's mother was allowed to bring her children to work. Archie was about 4 or 5 and his sister was two years older when they began helping their mother -- without pay -- in the mills. Their mother kept the younger children -- one she was still breast-feeding -- in a rolling cart.

Archie Love went to work on his own when he was around 8. He worked six days a week, sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day. He climbed the pay scale to $3 a week. He later wooed the woman who would become his wife in a mill, walking under her window and whistling, "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Love worked some 20 years in the mills, including sites in Pineville, N.C., and Charlotte.

People like Paul Love are Manning's focus. He seeks the descendants of the children in Hine's photos, not simply as a quest to piece together history but also to unite pictures with families and stories.

"History doesn't pay much attention to ordinary people," he said.

In 2005, an author friend asked him to find the family of a girl captured in a Hine photo.

Manning's friend was writing a book based on a Hine print of a girl who toiled in a cotton mill in southern Vermont. Initially, his comrade was trying to write a novel based on the photo, researching what her life might have been like.

"After she finished the book," Manning said, "she came to me and she said, 'You know, I'd really like to know what happened to the real girl.'"

Addie Laird was the recorded name, but there was no information about who she was.

While doing some genealogy research, Manning's friend found a reason to believe that the girl's last name was Card and had been inaccurately transcribed from Hine's notes.