Vintage Photos, Genealogy & Crime Stories
I had been planning to write a blog post about Harris Lyons for awhile, but I hadn't gotten around to it when I received a message on Ancestry about him. My correspondent noticed that I had saved a number of newspaper articles about him and wondered if I was a relative. I told her I … Continue reading Double Trouble, Or the Case of Two Mugshots
In my previous post I discussed an 1890s era mugshot in which two photographs were taken of the same man and combined to create a composite photo. I couldn't find out much about the man in the photos, however one thing is certain: he cooperated with having his photo taken. That was not always the … Continue reading The Struggle
I purchased this photo because I’d never seen another one like it. It was made in 1892 at the Woolfall & Welcome photography studio in Pittsfield, a city near the western edge of Massachusetts. For those of you who’ve grown up in the era of electronic images, the photo was not easy create. To start, … Continue reading Two for the Price of One
A couple of months ago this image caught my eye when I saw it for sale at an online vintage photo fair. The seller titled it "Four mug shots framed in a mat with a prisoner stripe motif." Obviously, I wasn't able to examine it in person, but got in touch with the seller and … Continue reading An Odd Display
Annie Stocinski was arrested on December 18, 1909 for larceny from a shop near the "Boston Stone," a tourist attraction in that city. She was arrested with another person whose name and number went unrecorded.
I call them the Boston Crooks, though to be honest I’m not sure where they were arrested, but it might have been Boston. Like half the population of Boston in the late nineteenth century, all except one of them have Irish surnames. The guy in the yellow turtleneck, Paul Lemto, is the exception. The man … Continue reading Blue-eyed Boston Crooks
Captured and Exposed 