The Lost Girls

A complete change of subject and style today:

Reading recently an all-too-common lament about a pile of family snapshots discovered with nothing in writing to identify them I could not help thinking how sad it is that so many photographs taken to preserve memories of loved ones cease to have any significance over time, all for the want of a scribbled note of date or place or names, and this reminded me that although it is easy today to file the details with new digital images, any rediscovered film or plate photos need to be researched and captioned now, while still in living memory.

I do not know who took the photograph at the top of this page, and nobody alive today can identify these young girls although I can make an educated guess that they might be the three sisters of a lady I met late in life who is sadly no longer with us and this mounted print found among her possessions is now the only tangible proof that they ever existed, which I find very sad because “every picture tells a story,” which comes into existence at the moment the button is pressed and can be lost for ever for the want of a written note . . .  but as a journalist I would say that, wouldn’t I?