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Behind the Finds | Every picture has a story

Posted on March 24th, 2025 By: Tonya Strickland

The Wolfords of Tacoma and Cromwell

By Tonya Strickland, in collaboration with columnist Greg Spadoni

In their latest storytelling collaboration, Gig Harbor Now writers Tonya Strickland and Greg Spadoni launch a new series called Behind the Finds on the premise that every picture has a story — and some are just waiting to be rediscovered.

Once upon a time, Gig Harbor Now history columnist Greg Spadoni and I wandered through Josephine’s Mercantile, a vintage/antiques collective on Bay Street in Port Orchard. Like any good journalists, we were on the lookout for stories. But since we’re also a little kooky, we couldn’t help hoping to turn up some mysteries, too.

As you may recall, Greg and I collaborate from time to time, and it didn’t take long to realize we both share a curiosity around old photographs — and all the unknowns they quietly carry. So one day in early February, we set out to find a few worth digging into. As we drove, the two of us set our first goal: Find old photos and tell their stories. Easy enough. But, we write for Gig Harbor Now, so the images had to tie in with something Gig Harbor-related. As much as we’d love to explore the lives behind every vintage snapshot, narrowing the scope to something local better serves our readers. Our second goal: develop mini biographies of the people and places within the pics, breathing life into moments that could often be nearly a century old.

Tonya Strickland browses old photographs for sale. Photo by Greg Spadoni.

Once those two goals were met, we could turn our endeavor into a series — the very series you’re reading today, in fact. Because the photos’ stories are just waiting to be rediscovered. And some have been!

In future installments of this series, readers will learn all about a little girl and her family: the Wolfords and the Persings, going back to a couple of generations and then springing forward again to the relatives who could still be alive today. Many of their little mysteries have been solved and retrofitted with mini-biographies and cross-checked facts from birth and death certificates, the U.S. Census and — our fave — lots and lots of old newspaper clips.

As a result, the stories Greg and I have uncovered blend genealogical quirks with the fun of historical sleuthing — giving a peek into the lives of early residents and how the places they lived or frequented changed over time. We’ll even be sharing side-by-side imagery of how the buildings and places pictured in the photos have changed over the years.

Sidenote: I know what you might be thinking. This series sounds an awful lot like “The Photo Angel” project by Massachusetts resident Kate Kelly. For those unaware, Kelly buys old photos from second-hand stores, uses the internet to research the people in them, and locates the subjects’ modern-day relatives to reunite the pics with long-lost relatives. Her efforts have earned her national recognition and a devoted Facebook following. I admire what Kelly has accomplished. That said, our photo-focus here is different in that we’re here for the stories behind the images. That said, if family or friends happen to find our articles and recognize the names or the people photographed, it would be awesome to make that connection.

Back at Jo’s

So there we were, heading into Jo’s — as the shop is affectionately known — to browse a booth Greg saw photos at on his solo trip there four months earlier. From upcycled wonders to vintage gems, Josephine’s Mercantile is a collaborative marketplace featuring secondhand vendors and crafters who each curate their own spaces to varied aesthetics. For sellers, Jo’s is a showcase of creativity and the charm of the repurposed. For shoppers like Greg and me, it’s just plain fun — we never know what we’ll find.

Magpie + Raven’s space at Josephine’s Mercantile in Port Orchard. Photo taken in February 2025 by Tonya Strickland.

And, really, the store was full of treasures. We looked for the exact photos Greg remembered, but they were gone. That same booth owner, however, restocked with a few new photos to peruse, as well as some old postcards among the antique dressers and books. Later, we found ourselves walking around Jo’s a little more until we spotted Magpie + Raven, a mid-century modern-meets-boho space decorated with quirky bookshelves topped with hat boxes and lamps alongside a framed piece of white lace, vintage crates, blankets and magnets. That space, which, as we’d later find out, is owned by local seller Heather Rennaker.

Heather had a ton of photographs stacked in a bronze bowl and a copper-colored platter. Their black-and-white and sepia tones displayed atop an industrial rolling cart easily caught our eye. Greg and I each picked up a stack to browse. As I flipped through, quickly slipping the top photo to the bottom to reveal the next, and the next — the search for clues on the “who” and “where” played out in a shuffle of moments, rewinding time frame by frame. About 10 pictures in, I spied one-third of a boat name and some water that could’ve possibly been the Puget Sound (spoiler: it was) so I placed that photo in our “maybe” stack of promising pics with potential location leads.

Only picking local photos sounds simple enough. But in reality, confirming a local connection is a task and a half. It means following even the smallest of breadcrumbs to get to any sort of research starting point. Greg and I squinted at faded cursive, scanned skylines with my iPhone camera zoomed to 3x, and Googled partial addresses spotted on Depression-era porch posts, all in the hopes that something, anything, could trace the image back to, at the very least, Washington state.

The research

When it comes to the who, what, where and when of an otherwise unidentified photograph — Greg and I both know that finding any information can feel impossible at times. In 2021, before Greg became Gig Harbor Now’s history columnist, he wrote about his museum captioning endeavors in a blog post titled Decoding Gig Harbor History Through Photographs (How cool is that?) In that post, Greg writes:

“Sometimes we simply can’t make out the necessary details to identify people, locations, or background objects. … Primary subjects are usually the most important part of any photo, but seemingly incidental people or objects can often be very relevant to Gig Harbor history, and even provide clues to other aspects of early life on the Peninsula.”

Secondhand photos are delightful little puzzles in that way. There’s no telling if the people in a stack of photos are connected. In all likelihood, one pile of pictures could hold any number of unrelated people and moments from all across the country — each from different eras even — all inevitably mixed together at random. You just never know. Even though we know the odds for research failure, it was a challenge we were willing to accept.

That happened to us at Jo’s. As we were browsing, amid the thin white borders and cardstock frames, one image stopped me in my tracks. It was of a little girl. Something about her face — a mischievous twinkle from within — reminded me of my 5-year-old niece, Delphi. I placed her photo in the ‘keep’ pile before I resumed the flipping and sorting, hoping to see her again. And not as another nameless portrait, but as a snapshot with writing on the back or, I don’t know, an action shot with the large, undeniable snow-capped silhouette of Mount Rainier in the background? (What? A girl can dream …)

From left: Jean Wolford, circa 1930; Delphi, Tonya’s niece, circa 2024.

To my delight, the little girl in question was in a lot of the photos, many of which showed her alongside what appeared to be her family, each posing outside of a house. Could it be in Gig Harbor? Or, was I looking at a neighborhood in Michigan? I hadn’t seen any clues to determine that just yet. In the end, a picnic photo of the same family turned out to be the MVP of the day — as it sported a (surprisingly rare) handwritten caption on the back. The delicate, swooping penmanship of a 20th century handwritten note on the back of a photo can sometimes be tough to decipher. But this one was mercifully clear: “We had 2 boys from Fort Lewis in to dinner.”

… Fort Lewis: bingo! It was the local reference we needed. Greg told me Fort Lewis was the previous name of the U.S. Army base south of Tacoma, before it became Joint Base Lewis–McChord in 2010. And that’s all it took — that one small detail, one undeniable link tying this family to the Puget Sound and not some random midwestern state lacking geographical ties to Gig Harbor Now readers. The best part? I got to learn more about the mysterious little girl and her family who lived in the very region we call home. (And, later, even closer ties to Gig Harbor were formed when the same family moved to or visited a beach house in Cromwell). And that’s researchers’ gold.

Motivations

Before, when I referenced The Photo Angel project, I said that her big mission was to connect previously unidentified photos sold at stores with their living relatives. For me, this project is about uncovering the details behind a photo — but perhaps even unearthing the stories beyond the images as well. I’m fascinated by how entire lives can be pieced together using one’s documented footprint.

My interest in finding these details comes from my own history as a newspaper reporter in my 20s and 30s, when I wrote feature profiles on all sorts of people. It’s a skill that’s now followed me into my 40s and morphed into a hobby that branches out in all sorts of directions — from researching the residential genealogies of old houses, to writing about places to explore with kids in my Two in Tow column, and even my 2024 deep dive into World War II veterans for Gig Harbor Now’s 14 Names to Remember Project.

Maybe my intrigue stems from the human tendency to romanticize the past. I’m not sure. But perhaps these little mysteries are less about the past itself and more about the human desire to connect with others — even across time.

Greg Spadoni browses old photographs for sale.

Greg, meanwhile, likes facts. And comedy. He shares more about his motivation in his column today But having known him for a year or so, I can say this: Greg, with his impressively cool knack for uncovering extra-hard-to-find records, is always up for the hunt. He’s already dug up an extraordinary amount of information on the Wolfords and those related to them for our first round of bios. For those initial stories, though, Greg is focusing less on the real-life stuff and more on his own unique contribution of adding humor to the series.

He’ll be crafting his own witty captions for the photos, complete with fictional names and playful, made-up scenarios — all in the name of fun. Just ask anyone who attended his recent presentation to the Gig Harbor Midday Rotary Club about vintage newspaper ads; they’ll tell you, he has a gift for that kind of thing.

While Greg favors the comedic approach, he’ll still write some real biographies for this series. His interest in old photos is rooted in some serious fact-checking after all —for both the Harbor History Museum and his own column here at Gig Harbor Now. For years, he’s meticulously researched records and drawn on his lifelong local knowledge to verify names, places, and events in partnership with the museum’s collections team and its historic image gallery.

Where stories lead

And so begins our new project, a slow-burn detective-type series where Greg and I will dig into the lives in old photographs. It’s a place where a face in a photo from long ago may very well unfold into a full life story — complete with all their milestones just waiting to be rediscovered. Because photos aren’t just pieces of worn paper with imagery on them — they can be a doorway into a past unknown.

And Greg and I can’t wait to see where they lead.

Stay tuned for our second article in this series that kicks off soon with our first biography. It tells the story of Jean Wolford, and how her last name would’ve been entirely different if life hadn’t played out in unexpected ways during her paternal grandfather’s early childhood in the 1800s.