Who are these people!?

2004.21.1590

The Log House Museum has thousands of photos in our collection Unfortunately, quite a large number of these photos have no identifying information! No names, no dates, no places, sometimes not even any clues. This makes it very difficult to interpret what is happening in the photo and to determine the relevance the photo has to the collection and overall mission. This problem of unidentified persons is not limited to museum collections though. This is a problem that is probably lurking in your home, in your family's photo collection. I know it is in mine! A good habit to get into is labeling photos on the back in pencil, so that future researchers will not be perplexed by the questions "Who ARE these people and why do I care?"

We do know that this photo belongs to Lucille's Photographic Salon Collection. Lucille Mason operated a photo studio in West Seattle from the 1960's-1990's. She had worked at other photo studios before that. By knowing the provenance of the accession this photo belongs to, a safe guess would be that this is a family who lived in or had ties to West Seattle. But her studio also specialized in photo restoration, so there is no guarantee that this photo was taken at the studio. What are some of the visual clues in this photo that may help us determine something about the family?