As promised, I’m continuing my examination of the photos in the Album Rescue Project. I’ve created a spreadsheet of all of the codes written on the photos, to make them easier to group. My hope is to interpret what at least some of the codes mean because this may provide further clues as to the identities of those pictured in the album.
I have come up with a new theory about the codes and who wrote them. My hunch is that the album’s star–the girl featured in most of the album’s photos–was the original owner of the albums and that she wrote a lot of the captions. However, I don’t think she necessarily also wrote the codes. My reasons for this: the handwriting is slightly different in the codes than in the captions; the codes are written in ink and almost all of the captions are in pencil; some of the photos have multiple codes. My thinking is that a subsequent possessor of the albums started coding the photos in order to organize them either for divvying up among family members or for selling. Many, many of the albums’ original photos were no longer in the albums when I purchased them. A friend of mine suggested that a previous owner may have sold some of the photos individually before offloading the albums.
On to the codes themselves. I’m starting with the letter ‘B.’ No ‘A’s were used in the codes. Below are the photos incorporating the letter ‘B’ in some way. There are a variety of subjects portrayed. I think codes incorporating ‘B,’ ‘2B,’ ‘3B’ and ‘BB’ all stand for different things.
I think that ‘2B’ and ‘3B’ are particular to the locations pictured. ‘3B’ photos in particular seem to be from some sort of summer destination or gathering spot. Regarding ‘BB,’ I don’t think it is necessarily particular to the subject of Red Bridge Park as there are other photos from that park without a code using ‘BB.’