The Quest To Identify MORE Than 60,000 Old Photos Taken In Newport News

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Winston Favor, a curatorial assistant at Mariner’s Museum and Park in Newport News, is still urging the public to help him identify thousands of individuals who appear in photos that were taken in the 1930s in Newport News.

Favor is currently wrapping up part two of the Ellis Parker Griffith Collection, which is named after Ellis Parker Griffith, the official photographer for Newport News Shipbuilding. Griffith’s photographs are preserved in the Museum’s archives. The Black-and-white photos provide a unique window into early 20th-century Newport News. You can access the collection online at https://catalogs.marinersmuseum.org/object/ARC269.

“Most came to us without names or context,” Favor said in a recent blog on the museum’s website, describing the museum’s ongoing “Hidden Histories” program that was launched in 2021. The photos contain clues but not specific details “that help us piece together what we are seeing through Griffith’s unique window on Newport News,” he said.

Favor’s research led him through troves of public records that, for example, confirmed that longtime Newport News Public School nurse Carrie Bolden worked in the local Walter Reed Emergency Hospital. The problem is Favor has a group photo of all Walter Reed Hospital employees but her known image does not match that of any woman in the photo.

Puzzling questions continue to surface as he tries to identify names and other details about subjects in multiple photos including one that shows about three dozen employees posing outside of Walter Reed Hospital.

“Questions remain about other people in the photo,” Favor said. “Are the African-American men sitting in the chairs, Dr. Walter Foreman and Dr. Ezekiel Ezra Smith, both of Whittaker Memorial Hospital? Was one of the women Berta Winne? Could another be Edith Bowersox? The search continues,” Favor said.

He also wants to identify all of the subjects who were members of a basketball team who are photographed on the steps outside of a home. Were they members of the YMCA located on the corner of Marshall and 22nd Street, or 2200 Marshall Ave?

“With the YMCA identified, I sought to determine who the boys are in the photo,” Favor wrote in his blog. “I was able to identify three of the boys using a picture of the 1925 basketball team in the book “Huntington High School, a symbol of community hope and unity, 1920-1971.”

He is still trying to identify a group of women and girls posing outside of the Girls Club organized by “War Camp Community Service,” a club for Black girls and the headquarters for the Girls Division. Three founding members of the WCCS opened the Girls Club on 25th Street in a building leased by the WCCS on March 21, 1919.

“With these details, I was sure that I would be able to identify the woman and girls in the photo. I looked in census records and other newspaper articles to see if any of the ladies mentioned were in the images above. Unfortunately, my search came up empty,” Favor said.

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“As we identify more of the men and women in the images and their stories become known, they are no longer faces in a photo but people who lived, loved, and worked in Newport News and elsewhere,” he said.

“You never know – the person you see in the image might not be a stranger, but your own ancestor.”

Contact Favor at wfavor@marinersmuseum.org or call (757) 596-2222.