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|[pic]Faces of the past |

|Author is on a mission to find stories of young mill workers photographed by Lewis Hine |

|By Phyllis McGuire |

|Article Launched: 01/04/2007 09:44:59 AM EST |

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|Joseph Crapo, 47 Fruit St. Works in Eclipse Mills. Apparently 13 years old. Location: North... |

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|[pic]Thursday, January 04 |

|Sherlock Holmes cap and coat would be appropriate attire for Joe Manning. |

|Manning, a retiree who is now an author, is immersed in a search for clues - clues that would lead to the life path traveled by |

|children whom Lewis Hine, an advocate of child labor reform, photographed in the early l900s as they worked in mills around the |

|country, including North Adams. |

|"I am a late-budding historian," said Manning, author of "Steeples," "Disappearing into North Adams" and "Gig at the Amtrak." |

|Manning said he owes his interest in the Hine photos to Williamstown author Elizabeth Winthrop, who hired him a year ago to |

|trace the life of Addie Card, a 12-year-old mill worker in Pownal, Vt., whose photograph was the inspiration for Winthrop's |

|newest novel, "Counting on Grace." |

|"My success astonished me, and the degree that it was an emotional search amazed me," Manning said. "Hine only photographed |

|Addie, but I turned her into a human being. And I asked myself, 'Why couldn't I do this with the other children Hine |

|photographed?'" |

|'Typical American stories' |

|Embracing that challenge, Manning discovered that of the 5,000 Hine photographs donated to the Library of Congress, |

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|about 35 to 40 percent were accurately identified. He started looking at the photographs on the Internet and was struck by one |

|boy. |

|"Not just the face, but the name: Danny Mercurio," Manning said. "I thought there couldn't be many people with that name." |

|Through Word Search, which is available at the Williams College library and the Smith College library, he obtained general data |

|about Mercurio. He said he had a "eureka" moment when he saw Mercurio's name in the census. Then, reading obituaries at Smith |

|College, Manning found out that Mercurio died in Washington, D.C. |

|Within a day, he tracked Mercurio's grandson through the Internet phone listings, called him and asked for an interview. |

|"He was excited," Manning said. |

|The life stories of the children Manning has resurrected through research "wind up as typical American stories," he said. |

|"That is what makes them so valuable to the study of history," he said. |

|'Window to family history' |

|On a personal level, Manning has been moved by Hine's photographs. Children used in coal mining were the most wrenching, he |

|said. |

|And Manning remembers well a picture of two girls who were mill hands in North Carolina. |

|"I stared at the kids and they stared back, as if they were asking, 'What are you going to do about me?'" Manning said. |

|Researching the girl identified as Minnie Carpenter, Manning found out she died in l973 in Gastonia, N.C., where she had been |

|brought up. |

|She never married or had children, Manning said. She was survived by a nephew, now 84 years old. After reaching the nephew by |

|phone, Manning mailed him the picture of his aunt. As it turned out, the other girl in the picture was the nephew's mother, and |

|he had never seen a picture of her as a little girl. He made 50 copies of the photo for all the relatives in Gastonia. |

|"I started out thinking what could I find out from the kids' descendants, not what I could give them." Manning said. "But I |

|opened a window to a family history they never had." |

|A granddaughter of Elsie, a 6-year-old who worked in a sardine cannery in Eastport, Maine, "can't stop thanking me for finding |

|out about her grandmother," Manning said. "She had no idea her grandmother had worked in a cannery." |

|Other people have reacted emotionally to the photographs of their deceased relatives. |

|Sara, 82, burst into tears upon seeing a photograph of a girl Hine identified as Pearl. |

|"That's my mother. Where'd you get that picture?" Sara cried out. |

|In an interview, Sara told Manning her mother's story: "Pearl's family loved her. She liked to dress up, liked her children to |

|look neat all the time, kept a clean house, had medical problems in her 50s," Manning said. "And her daughter felt she died |

|because she worked in a mill." |

|It was not a daughter but a son who recounted the life of his father, an 8-year-old immigrant in a Hine photograph. "A waif of a|

|kid holding up a rack of chewing gum for the camera," Manning said of the photograph. |

|The son, a 62-year-old chemistry professor, told of a trick his father used as a newsie. |

|"When it was raining and he wanted to go home, he hid his newspapers (except for one), in the bushes," the professor told |

|Manning. "Buy my newspaper and I'll go home," the boy would say, holding up that one paper. And so it went, until he sold all |

|his newspapers. |

|That immigrant boy had the foresight to buy land when it was undeveloped and then made a lot of money during the building boom |

|following World War II. |

|"Because of that, he was able to give his son money to go to MIT," Manning said. "The son's work in chemistry has presumably |

|helped the world. He just missed winning the Nobel Prize." |

|That 8-year-old immigrant boy lived the American Dream, rising from humble beginning to prosperity. On the other hand, Manning's|

|research revealed that a 5-year-old newspaper boy about whom Hine wrote, "He's good at striking for nickels" ended up an armed |

|robber. |

|'It's about the kids' |

|Now Manning is searching for families of children who worked at the Eclipse Mill in North Adams, children Hine photographed when|

|he came through the city. |

|"One boy lived to be 94," Manning said. "I saw the house he lived in. It's on Front Street across from the mill." |

|That man was a member of a French Canadian family with a very colorful history, Manning said. |

|Manning is close to finding descendants of some of the other children, but he does not have the time needed to follow leads. |

|"I'm a one-man band," he said. |

|In the six months since he began working on the project, sometimes he has been able to contact descendants quickly, other times |

|he finds himself at a dead end. |

|"When you are frustrated and come across a scrap of information, it keeps you going," he said. |

|Manning believes there are three ways to tell his story: In a book he would put together as a writer; in a documentary, the |

|camera following him around as he interviews descendants and the camera going to Gastonia, N.C., North Adams, Vermont, New |

|Hampshire, etc; and in a traveling exhibition that would show where the children worked and lived plus pictures and descriptions|

|supplied by their descendants. |

|Manning said he would be happy if someone like Ken Burns, an acclaimed American documentary filmmaker, or the Smithsonian came |

|along. |

|But whatever comes of his ideas, Manning feels he is doing a good thing. |

|"It's not about me," he said. "It's about the kids." |

|For more information, |

|visit Manning's Web site at . |

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