Family Archive

A Theatrical Photograph

From the very first time I saw this shot of Harry and Juliet it was always one of my favorites. For reasons unknown to me at the time it struck me differently than the others. It somehow felt more resonant and personal despite the fact that I knew very little about it.

Most photographs capture a moment in time. They are utilitarian. But on the rare occasion when everything is just so... the light is perfect, the photographer on his game, the composition organic and all the planets are perfectly aligned; a photograph can be so much more. It can be a narrative. It can be a novel. It can jostle your imagination and tell you a story. This photo was like that for me. It made my mind race to look at it and always made me smile. I created stories based on what I knew about it. But I wanted the true story, the details, the context. How do I make that happen?  

I created my own "punch list" of questions that helped me gather information and develop clues to learn more about it. My list included questions about the photo itself (the actual piece of paper): Where did I find it? What was it next to? What else was near it? Was there anything written on the back? And questions about the photographs content. Who is it of? Are there other people in it? Is there anything I recognize or that stands out (Location, objects, subject matter)? Does it remind me of other photos? Is anything unusual or out of the ordinary happening? Who might have taken it? When was it taken? Where are they? What are they wearing? 

Here are some interesting clues and deductions I made from my list of questions.

1.There was nothing written on the photograph but I found it in a box of family photos not with Harry or Juliet's photo collections, press books or scrap books even though it was definitely stage related.

2.They were both in full costume in the picture which meant they were performing together. This was very unusual. Harry wrote some of Juliet's material but they were both solo performers. I hadn't remembered ever reading or hearing of them working together in the same show or even on the same billing.

3.The costumes they are wearing were not from their Vaudeville routines. They were more like theater or movie costumes. He wore what looked like an Old Military costume (maybe Cavalry) and she looked like a mannequin of a Gypsy Princess.

5.I had seen enough photographs of my Grandfather to tell he was in his early 20s here. He was born in 1892 so that would put this picture somewhere between 1913-1917 (he went into the Navy during WWI in 1918.)

6.From the shadows you can tell that it was taken outside but there are no distinguishing landmarks or way of telling where it might be.

7.There were some interesting props and wardrobe pieces. He had a sword and wore riding boots and she had a long bead necklace and wore an unusually shaped tiara on her head.

Was this enough to figure it out? I went to the internet and started to search. Juliet had changed her name a few times and I wasn't exactly sure when she had changed it or how to search "Miss Juliet" or "Juliet?" so I thought a good place to start would be to search Harry Delf on the IBDB, the Internet Broadway Data Base, a fairly comprehensive collection of Theater and the people connected to the Theater through history. This search yielded 14 item but only 3 of them fell in the years from 1913-1917 so this was a starting point. I recognized all the different titles. The first 2 were from 1914 and the third from 1916. The third was The Cohan Revue of 1916. I clicked on it. I remembered seeing material from this show when putting together the archive. I remembered that Juliet had played a leading role but I had never known my Grandfather was in the show as well. On the site I learned Harry played a character named Billie Holliday. I looked down the cast and sure enough listed as Miss Juliet there she was. http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=8268. The George M Cohan Revue was one of the biggest Theater Productions of that year. It played at the Astor Theater in NYC. I went back to my archive and found what I had from the show. 

I found a few different Program/Playbills and a bunch of newspaper articles about the show. I knew I was on the right trail. I started leafing through the program and found this and I instantly knew that I had nailed it.

Look at it next to  the photo from above. Juliet is on the left side in the front. Her headpiece and the long string of beads were the important clues that this was the show where the photo was taken.The dress sealed it.

 

The Rosenfelds

My Grandfather Harry and Great Aunt Juliet had a younger sister named Marjorie Rosenfeld. This is a photograph circa 1920 of my Great Aunt Marjorie with her parents, my Father's Grandparents, Sam and Sarah Rosenfeld. Unlike  her two siblings Marjorie was not a professional actress or in Show Business. Marjorie took  a different path. She married a dentist named DDS Irving Perlmutter, moved to the suburbs and had 2 daughters. As it turns out, she got married 5 days before my Grandparents in June of 1927.

In an old leather valise at the top of a closet in my sister's old bedroom I found reels and reels of 16MM film that my Grandfather had shot in the late 1920's and 1930's. As well as being an actor and a playwright Harry was also an Early filmmaker who owned a 16mm movie camera in the 1920's and did a fairly thorough job of documenting his life on it. I restored and put the films onto DVD's and I'm currently teaching myself how to edit this unique and extraordinary footage which includes the wedding of my Great Aunt Marjorie, the wedding of my Grandparents and my Grandparents honeymoon; all relatives  I never got the opportunity to meet, who passed before I was born.  

   

Jeanne

My Grandfather Harry and Great Aunt Juliet were not the only Vaudeville performers in the family. Jeanne Densen (born in 1902 in New York City) was a stage actress who performed in Musical Theater and  Operettas in the early to mid-1920's. Harry and Jeanne were married on June 19, 1927. They had 2 children my Aunt Enid and my Father Harry Jr. After my Grandparents were married Jeanne left the Theater. I've uncovered only a few items from her stage legacy in my archive and found very little about her career on the internet, but I'm still hunting.

Above is an article from the Seattle Sun from the year 1926. My Grandmother, Jeanne is on the bottom right(5). She starred in an adaptation of Franz Schubert's "Blossom Time". I've done my best to protect the clipping using archival materials but the newspaper is disintegrating away. The article on the left below was from an issue of Variety, 1927. The article on the right I'm not certain which newspaper it came from.

  

 

PS 68

So far I've focused on still photography as a cornerstone of the family archive but other artifacts can be equally or more enlightening depending on the resources you have available to you, what you're trying to figure out and how deep you're willing to dig. Here is a piece from the turn of the century which taught me something interesting by leading me to a new stream of questioning to follow.

This is a certificate a child received from the city school system after finishing third grade. Harry Rosenfeld had received this certificate after finishing third grade at PS 68. Who was Harry Rosenfeld? I googled PS 68 and found out it was on Monticello Ave in the Bronx. I figured it had to be my Grandfather. I found it in a box of his stuff. I remembered that my father had told me that his grandfather, my great grandfather had been born in New York so that would mean that if I was right and Harry Rosenfeld was my grandfather then it would have to have been either my father or him that changed our family name to Delf after already having been here in NYC for at least 2 generations and that didn't make sense to me. I called my dad at work and started firing questions at him.

What I eventually learned was that Harry Rosenfeld was my Grandfather and that it was he who had changed the name. He had dropped the Rosen and reconfigured the letters of Feld to come up with Delf to use as his stage name on the Vaudeville circuits. At the time his sister, my great aunt Juliet went by the name Juliet? which transitioned to Miss Juliet and eventually into Juliet Delf and the  family name wound up sticking.

Its amazing what you can learn with a little deduction and taking the time ask.

Old Things

I've always been attracted to old things. There's something innately valuable about them.  They trigger a pleasure center by disrupting the context of the present world while providing insights into the future. Some people refer to this as history others might think its a form of escapism, still others call it nostalgia,  however you want to tag it, I'm drawn to it. Other than as decorations  what can you do with old things? How do you use them? learn from them? What are the factors that make  material  items evolve into new forms and make their predecessor old? Better technology. Is technology always better?  How is a passion for old things compatible with the current technological revolution and 2.0 world?  

I'm also intrigued and always pulled in by family stories and dynamics. People preserve their histories and legacies differently; heirlooms, lore, photographs, etc. But they're almost always handed down by way of the family. Sometimes they're simply given over by a parent or relative other times they can be discovered through  less traditional or expected paths.

These are my first thoughts and queries as I enter the blogging arena. A few years ago, I stumbled on a remarkable collection of personal family history  at the top of a closet in my parent's apartment. Some of my findings are over a century old and covered several different types of media. Since then I've immersed myself in this discovery and  figuring out how to "handle it"; to use the resources available to me to learn about, catalog, preserve, write about and ultimately pass it on to my kids and their families. 

In this space I hope to share the knowledge and insights I gained through this experience and hopefully get others to share their interesting family stories, discoveries and archives with me.