If You Are Or Know This Little Girl, The Museum of the Confederacy Would Like a Word
At long last, Americans can finally do their part to help out the Confederacy, or, anyway, the Museum of the Confederacy.
The Associated Press reports that curators are seeking the public's help in putting names (and descendents) to the faces of people depicted in eight unclaimed Civil War-era photographs.
If you or someone you know is featured in one of the images available for giant-sized viewing on the MSNBC Photo Blog, please contact the Museum of the Confederacy at once and also the police because there is a Civil War vampire on the loose.
Such unclaimed photographs, the AP explains, were typically picked up on the battlefields after their original owners had fallen, and passed down through generations. Only two of museum's portraits (which include ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes) depict soldiers, and only one of those soldiers has been definitively identified as a Confederate.
Most of the others show children or families, though one is of Just Some Random Guy.
Now curator Ann Drury Wellford is hopeful that someone's great-great-great-grandson will see a picture on Twitter of, say, one of the dolled-up four-year-old girls and immediately recognize her as his flesh and blood.
The AP article doesn't say what the Museum of the Confederacy intends to do with the photos , apart from tenderly kissing them in thanks for this great free press, if they're unable to track down the subjects' descendents.
They'll probably just keep them for themselves, as they have done since they acquired them sixty years ago.
Then maybe a century from now we can circulate the images again and see if anyone recognizes them.
[Associated Press // MSNBC // Museum of the Confederacy // Image via AP/Museum of the Confederacy]