The National Library Photo Detectives on this photograph.......
Meet Annie and Edward Riley, and their twins, Sutcliffe and Ethel. We were amazed to find out so much about them. The Rileys had been living in Massachusetts, USA and were travelling to visit relatives in England during World War I. Their ship, the Lusitania, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the Irish coast. The Rileys were incredibly lucky, as few Lusitania families survived intact. A great newspaper report (thanks, Sharon Corbet!) about their final safe arrival in Bradford ended: “After not sleeping for three nights, Mr Riley remarked that it felt grand to be back home again, surrounded by their friends and family.”
The Story of The National Library Photo Detectives
They hunt through family history sites for missing brides, soldiers and children. They pour over census records and cross reference leads against old newspaper clippings. When the going gets tough they hit the streets with maps in hand, or hit Google Streetview looking for figments of the past amidst the present. Sometimes they get lucky and a long lost relative gets in touch, or find a local with a good memory for faces and names.
They’re Photo Detectives and ever since the National Library of Ireland began posting images on Flickr in 2011 they’ve been figuring out the who, when and where hidden in old photographs. This crowdsourcing has proven effective as well as popular. To date the NLI account has almost 35 thousand followers and has received some 40 thousand comments.
The more than 5 million photos held by the NLI span over 150 years of history, but don’t necessarily have captions or other information identifying people, places and dates. Posting images online and inviting amateur sleuths to track down a photograph’s details is the only practical way to fill in a lot of blanks
New images are posted almost daily, accompanied by whatever information archivists have on hand. Sometimes the crowdsourcing focuses on figuring out the basics of who’s in a picture and where it was taken.
Other times, the mystery is a matter of context, unearthing the story behind a photograph by digging into the details of a long lost trade or a piece of antiquated equipment. Comments become an evolving conversation of facts revealed and checked, congratulations and personal anecdotes shared.
As things take shape, NLI’s Flickr curator updates descriptions to reflect what discoveries have been made. The process is intentionally bouncy and fun, more like a game with a play-by-play announcer than a night in doing homework.
An exhibition featuring 26 photographs, annotated with crowdsourced information and context, is free and open to the public seven days a week.
Photo Detectives runs through until September 2018 at the National Photographic Archive in Temple Bar, Dublin.
https://www.flickr.com/nationallibraryarchive
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