By David Manoucheri
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) — Melody Edwards’ apartment in Sacramento is filled with little treasures.
“I found this in a dumpster in Lincoln, California,” Edwards announces, showing a piece of art hanging on the wall behind her couch.
“These dolls here,” she says, touching a trio of stuffed characters, “I believe these did come from the same dumpster.”
In fact, a large amount of the items in her home were found in dumpsters over the past few years.
You would never know the well preserved, intact items had been tossed away by someone.
“The necklace I’m wearing,” Edwards says, holding up her jewelry, “these earrings.”
One particular piece she found diving in dumpsters, though, has stuck with her for a long time.
“I found a Victorian photo album,” Edwards explains proudly. She found the album six years ago in a box left in a dumpster.
It’s an album of photos more than a century old. “I don’t know, it just it just it seemed important to me. So I told my husband, just hang on to it,” she remembers. “The pictures, I was just floored by them. They looked important.”
The album sat in storage until she moved into her current apartment. She showed the album to a friend who had an unusual suggestion: “My best friend is a retired photographer, and she says you need to call Channel 3.”
Edwards’ call had a very specific request for help. “I would like to try to see if there’s any family left. And find them and find out who they are or who they were, and maybe get it back to the family.”
It certainly was a challenge. There are some clues. A first name here. A last name there. Names of photo studios appear on the bottom of the cardboard-backed photos. There wasn’t much else.
“I can tell you every genealogist, however long they’ve been doing it, have missing pieces of information,” explains Patty Milich with the Davis Genealogical Society. “In the early 20th century, very often immigrants went to studios, had them there themselves, photographed. The photographs were put on postcards which were sent back to the old country.”
Photos like the ones in this photo album, Milich says, were a way to show family in other countries you had made a success of your life in the U.S.
The photos weren’t easy to produce. The exposure time was far longer than the point-and-shoot you have with your phone. If you ever wondered why nobody is smiling in a photo from the 1800s or early 1900s, it’s because you had to sit for a long time holding a pose. Smiling for that long isn’t easy. Add to this that studios realized there was a market for portraits so they mass-produced them, so to speak. They used the same backdrops and the same props. That makes it very hard, from just the photograph, to know who the people are.
“The first thing you do is be happy that you found anything written at all, like a name, first or last,” says Milich.
She adds that photo studios had their locations, so that could give you an idea of where people might be from. Still, with photos being at a cost and studios in places like San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and beyond, people still traveled to those destinations as getaways.
So we started with the studios, including two based in Santa Cruz: Novelty Studios and McKean & Ort.
We also had some names, Mama Louise and Grandfather Rieffel. The names were written in cursive, obviously years later with a ballpoint pen, and in the margins of the album.
Grandfather Rieffel is where we started. On his lapel is a ribbon, a large medal with a bear and a large star attached. The ribbon notes the year 1850 and the letters P.C.P. We sent that information to the California State Library who, after some research, informed us that the letters stood for the Society of Pacific Coast Pioneers.
We found records of the P.C.P’s existence were donated to the state of Nevada. The records are now stored at the University of Nevada, Reno. A well-known “diarist” from the era kept their roles and names until a fire decimated the organization.
Eventually, though, the number of original pioneers, people who had settled California in the early 1800s, had died off, replaced by younger, more ambitious people. It was a dead end.
We moved from there to California census records. We started in 1850 and went forward into the 1900s.
The Rieffel name did lead us to a Santa Clara County list of biographies, where Louise Rieffel married Doctor Henry Forrest. That led to a child named Viola. Viola led us to the photo and one full name we had, Sumner McGinnis. That name then led us to a history of Santa Clara County, showing Sumner’s father. From there, a 1920 yearbook from Stanford University with a 20-year-old Sumner.
It took months of looking before we eventually found a listing for Sumner’s son, Jim McGinnis. His obituary had a next of kin listed. That took us to Carmel, California. Inside the reception room of a church, set up on tables, were photos and a waiting Deborah Anzini. Deborah McGinnis Anzini. She was the granddaughter of Sumner McGinnis, born in 1900 in San Jose.
“There’s quite a bit of traveling in my family,” Anzini says, showing us her family photos. “Which in 1900 was not an easy thing to do, you know. Both families were, I’m not sure if wealthy is the right word, but they they were very comfortable.”
By both families, she’s referencing the names we found in the album, Forrest and McGinnis.
Anzini’s family saw a lot of California’s history, it turns out. They survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She says her grandparents remembered living in a tent after their home and everything burned in the wake of that disaster.
Even after surviving that, her family fell victim, like so much of the U.S., to the Great Depression. Still, they would rally, moving to Salinas and starting a wholesale food business.
Anzini has a lot of photos, to be sure. But nothing like the book Melody Edwards found. “This is completely different than anything. We have all the albums that are completely different. So this is going to be very exciting to take a look at.”
Her biggest excitement on this day, though, was talking with Melody Edwards on the phone. “Hi. My name is Debbie McGinnis Anzini,” began the conversation we listened to that day. “So I am, Sumner, Dot’s granddaughter,” Anzini said.
Sumner went by Sumner ‘Dots’ McGinnis.
“He looks like a little boy in your album,” Edwards excitedly expounds. “Oh, my gosh, that’s one of my favorite pictures too.”
But there’s one part of this story that makes this photo find even more amazing, something Edwards revealed to Anzini on the phone: “So my husband and I, we were we were homeless for quite some time. We were living in our vehicle, and I needed gas money. So I decided to jump in the dumpster and find some recycling.”
Anzini teared up, saying “you’re really getting to me,” overcome with the moment. She could not even imagine that someone struggling just to survive would hold onto something this big, this heavy and keep it all those years.
Even struggling and unhoused, Edwards thought the album was important. She never, even then, considered selling it or trying to gain anything from it. She left it in storage with her kids in a box until she could get her life in order. Today, no longer on the streets, the photo book is one of the last puzzle pieces of Edwards’ life from that time. The piece is now firmly in its place.
We asked Edwards, if she had to list things off that are meaningful or unique, where the photo album would stand. Without hesitation, she says the album. “Number one. Completely.”
Patty Milich with the Davis Genealogical Society describes it this way: “It’s something we call we genealogists call a random act of genealogical kindness that you found it, and especially that you found the descendants to give the book to.” For Anzini, it’s something else entirely. “It’s such a miracle album. I’m so amazed that this happened.”
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