Today’s post is about a photo album that’s intrigued me since I first saw it about four years ago. I’ve shared a couple of the photos from the album in previous blog posts, referring to the album in which I found them as an album that probably belonged to my great-great-grandfather Frank Scott. The album itself is quite fascinating and is filled with photos from the 1920s of a well-to-do couple named “Roland and Flo” who apparently liked to travel quite a bit.
The photo album presents a comfortable but curious mix of people from two distinct socioeconomic strata. The first group includes my known Scott relations (my great-grandmother Gertrude Scott Askew, her sister Cassie Scott, her father Frank Scott, and his second wife Lois Lanudge Scott)—poorer folk working multiple jobs to make ends meet and living in rural Wadena county, Minnesota. The second group appears to center around the couple named Roland and Flo—an apparently well-heeled and well-traveled couple.
But who were Roland and Flo? Until last week, despite having records on over 13,000 people in my family history database, not a single one of those people was named Roland, and none of the women named Flo or Florence were possible candidates for Flo in the photo album.
In this first post, I just want to introduce you to the album—show you all of the pages with photos, and let you see the photos in their contexts on the various pages.
Pages as they appear in the album:
Front cover:
Inside front cover:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
Page 4:
Page 5:
Page 6:
Page 7:
Page 8:
Page 9:
Page 10:
Page 11:
Page 12:
Page 13:
Page 14:
Page 15:
Page 16:
Page 17:
Page 18:
Page 19:
Page 20:
Page 21:
Page 22:
Page 23:
(Pages 24–29 are blank)
Page 30:
Page 31:
Page 32:
Page 33:
(Pages 34–51 are blank)
Page 52:
Inside back cover:
Back cover:
Loose photos at end of album:
Loose photo 1:
Loose photo 2:
Front of loose photo 3:
Back of loose photo 3:
Questions to answer in future posts about this album:
- Who were Roland and Flo?
- Who wrote the captions (all of which are in the same hand, and two captions refer to an unknown woman as “Ma”)?
- Who are the other people in the album?
- Where were the photos taken?