What’s really nice about this collection is it exists in a numbered form. It’s already numbered. It, that’s one of its, um … characteristics, I guess you could call it. It’s not only pictures, and books, and writing — it’s organization. The uh, pictures are all numbered already, which means that, uh, we don’t have to actually apply an outside number to it, we just have to, uh, use the numbers that are already there.

This is one of our family albums. It was given to Mr. McCord, the McCord Museum, actually, by the Frothingham family, and in the album, which is, uh, it’s been numbered by us as an album, the photographs themselves are Notman photographs. So on the back of each of these photographs you find a number.

This one’s hard to see, it’s easier to read the one on the front, right there. There’s a number. So, we can look that one up right away and if we didn’t already know it was a member of the Frothingham family, we could just look that number up in Notman’s files and we would know who it is immediately. This is Louisa Davenport Hayward Frothingham.

The, uh, Frothingham family were quite interesting, actually. You can see from these photographs here that they went for various different poses. This kind of pose here is very unusual. A pose where a Victorian father is being informal with his daughters or children is rather unusual, and this family seems to have gone for the more informal poses.

So the advantage, uh, even though we have 450,000 Notman photographs, quite often people ask, “Why are you still collecting Notman photographs if you have all the images already? Why collect more?” Because there’s extra information, family information that we wouldn’t know otherwise. So in the family albums you can see the children growing up. Uh, later on you find them getting married, you find pictures of their husbands, pictures of their houses, pictures of the children.

Uh, here she is a little later for a fancy-dress ball. She looks quite effective! This is Harriet Frothingham, later Mrs. W. R. Miller.