In September of 1911, Lewis Hine took at least 40 child labor photographs in Winchendon, Massachusetts, a town in northern Worcester County. Ninety-seven years later, in September of 2008, I made a presentation about my project at the Springfield (Mass) Museums. After the event, a woman in the audience showed me copies of a few of these photos, all of them picturing a girl identified by Hine as Mamie LaBarge. The woman said that she believed that Mamie was her great aunt, and asked me to check into it.

Despite browsing through the Library of Congress photos many times, I didn't remember seeing any in Winchendon, nor did I know where the town was located. I agreed to help and started right away when I got home. Quickly, I found the photos on the library's website, and then I discovered that Winchendon is only about 60 miles from my home. Excited about the prospect of doing research "on site" rather than on the Web, I printed all the photos and captions and put them in a binder. Several days later, I drove to Winchendon and poured through birth, marriage and death records at the town hall, town directories at the library, and took an eerie walk around one of the mills, now closed, windowless and empty.

Click on Stories Of The Winchendon Children to see all of the completed stories. Click Hine's Photos In Winchendon to see a thumbnail gallery of all 40 photos, and a link to the Library of Congress website. See Glenallan Mill Gallery for more than 20 of my recent photos of the historic mill at which many of Hine's photos were taken.