ID Friday

Nothing strikes dread into the heart of a historian like the question “What do I do with these unidentified photographs?”, because the answer is generally “Make your best guess and keep the ones you have an idea about, ask your older relatives if they know anything, but there generally isn’t an easy way to figure it out.” Telling that to a person who is usually grieving the loss of a loved one, bringing home to them that they haven’t just lost a loved one, they’ve also lost untold stories and so much family history -- it’s not my favorite, and it happens with depressing regularity.

On those lines, here at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson, we have a new initiative, started by summer intern Mya Hewitt, to try to identify a collection of nearly 500 images she’s scanned and cataloged. We’re calling it ID Friday, posted weekly to the Archive’s Facebook page. We ask for comments suggesting possible identification, and we’ve already had some success.

A letter with the photos describes their journey from the back of a truck to the Archive Center. As the note reads, Kassel Studios at 124 N. Main St. in Cape Girardeau was closing, and boxes of photos were being dumped into the back of a truck. Bernhardt Lang of Lang Jewelers happened by on his way to lunch and managed to save one box, which remained at Lang Jewelers for several years. In 2006, Roger Lang donated the photographs to the Archive Center, where each one were sleeved, boxed and assigned a number.

A word about Lang Jewelers: The Lang family owned and operated the business at 126 N. Main St. in Cape Girardeau from 1916 to 2012, when Roger and Judy Lang retired. Sadly, Judy passed away in 2020 and Roger in 2022. According to Roger’s father Bernhardt’s 2003 obituary, Roger was the third generation to own the store. Bernhardt’s parents were Hugo and Anna Lang of Cape Girardeau, who had owned a shoe store in Cape Girardeau.

The photographs are divvied up into categories and illustrate everything from buildings in early Cape Girardeau to heavy industry to Marquette Cement (now Buzzi Unicem, south of town, where my grandfather worked in the 1980s when it was Lone Star Cement), to portraits of people and even a dairy farm.

We get a fair number of inquiries about old photos at the Archive, and we often have to tell people no. Photography was an expensive process up until maybe 15 years ago, and not a lot of people went around taking photographs. This is truer the further back in time one goes. We do house the Jackson Heritage Association photo collection, which is fully identified, and is focused mostly on Jackson. I also often refer callers to the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Cape Girardeau site, the Cape Girardeau County Historical Society’s History Center in Jackson and the Missouri Secretary of State’s Digital Heritage website, as all of them have extensive, identified photo collections.

Marybeth Niederkorn is the director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson. She is a member of various societies devoted to the region’s history, and is on Jackson’s Historic Preservation Commission. Educated at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, she holds degrees in philosophy and professional writing.