Lost in Time: Portraits From the Past
Lucy Robbins Welles Library
Newington
Oct. 7, 2024
By day, Erik S. Hinckley is an unassuming assistant town planner for the town of Newington. By night, he’s a detective, working to solve mysteries over a century in the making.
Well, he didn’t put it that dramatically. But that’s the impression I got when I went to Lucy Robbins Welles Library to hear him speak about a hobby of his, which is researching old pictures that he finds in his travels.
Hinckley, a local author and historian, uses all of the tools he’s developed over the years to try to identify the people in the pictures he’s purchased, where and how they lived and died, and whether they have any living relatives. He uses clues such as the clothes the people in the photos are wearing, even the furniture that appears alongside them. If he can determine that they have living relatives, he tries his best to return the pictures. He credits his interest in the project to his own love of local history and genealogy.
“These pictures were something I saw, so I grabbed a few to see what I could do,” he said.
He’s managed to do a lot in fact. He was able to determine that Charles Hastings Upton was a pilot for the United States military before he died in France in 1918. While Hinckley is too astute a historian to make leaps he can’t prove, I imagine that Upton was one of those first pilots taking warfare to the skies before being shot down in the waning months of the First World War. Meanwhile, his sister Thyra lived a long life, almost seeing the dawn of a new century before she passed away in October 1999.
Hinckley managed to tell part of the story of Edith and Marian Eldrid, sisters born in Muskogen, N.Y., in 1876. While Edith lived to see the age of the hippies before her death in 1968, poor Marian made it only to the age of 15. Hinckley suspects this may be the only picture of Marian. He returned the image to a cousin of the sisters who lived in St. Louis in July of this year.
Hinckley has inspired others to take up the work of exploring family history. One of his favorite pictures is of the Starr sisters, taken circa 1905. Older sister Grace lived as a housewife and had two children. She died in 1970. Ruth became a teacher, while having one child of her own before passing away in 1976 in New York. When he returned the image to one of their great-great granddaughters who was living all the way in Anchorage, Alaska, she said that the find inspired her mother to track down more family history.
“People want to feel a sense of history, and a connection to their own past,” he said when I asked him why the people he reaches out to would be interested in pictures that are over a hundred years old. “In some cases, people didn’t know about the history of their family or even what they look like.”
Hinckley is connecting people today to something that had been lost in memories long ago. If there’s a photo that gives us a glimpse into the past but doesn’t tell us who the photo belongs to, then rest assured that Erik S. Hinckley is on the case.
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Jamil returns to the Lucy Robbins Welles Library for an art exhibit.
