Circa 1917 Vacation Photo Album

I had a request on Instagram for a full scan of this photo album, after I posted a few photos from it awhile back.  Since my life is in flux and I've been on the cusp of moving since last summer, it has taken me this long to do this, as it along with many of my other antique treasures live at my father's house where they are not at risk for moving damage.  I present it to you in full here and I hope it will prove educational.

Now, I'm going to talk about use of these photos before I lose the tl;dr people: Please include a link to this page any time you use these photos.  While I'm not going to charge you for them or anything, and I do want them available for educational purposes, I don't want them ending up decontextualized all over the place where they'll become a nightmare for researchers who don't know where they came from.  If you have any questions, send me an email at fehlel (at) sage (dot) edu

I got this photo album at the Cambridge Antique Mart in Cambridge, MA.  While some of the subjects photographed are labeled with their first names, no last names are included, and so I have no way of knowing who these people were or where they lived.  One of the monuments photographed, Endicott Rock, in New Hampshire, still exists in much the same state as it was photographed here.  The other named place, Lake Winnipesaukee, is nearby in the same state.  Some of the later photos in the album are dated 1917, and the fashion seen in the album is certainly consistent with that date.  The same subjects, for the most part, appear again and again throughout the album, so I am inclined to assume that this was a family photo album for a New Hampshire vacation in 1917.  It shows the relationship between photography and the desire to document one's life and experiences over a century ago.  This behavior is not new to the 21st century, and in fact it gives us valuable insight into the lives of people in the past!  I only hope that family photo albums like this will survive in some form, as I know I have never made one in my life and all my photos are dumped onto my computer and never labeled.  It makes me wonder if future historians will have a hard time studying the post-digital age, and whether it is our responsibility to create content or if that will skew the future's view of history.

No more rambling!  Here is the photo album.  I have photographed it page by page so you see how things were laid out.  Fifty five pages of photo are followed by about twenty blank pages in the back of the album that I have not photographed.  Many of the blank pages show scars of having once had photos glued to them.  I hope these photos were simply moved to another album and not discarded.  What wonders might they have shown?

Please click on the photos to see the full-resolution version.