Finding a family photo via ArchiveGrid

I recently learned about ArchiveGrid from Lisa Louise Cook's Genealogy Gems. ArchiveGrid is an index of over 5 million archive records, including historical documents such as personal papers, manuscripts, correspondence, etc. The records span over 1,000 different institutions. So you can think of ArchiveGrid as the equivalent of WorldCat but for archives instead of for libraries.  That's particularly apt since ArchiveGrid is a service offered by WorldCat.

In the past I've had some success finding interesting records through archives. So ArchiveGrid sounded like a great tool. Naturally, I clicked through to check it out.  Since I had recently written several posts about my Jarecki relatives, I entered "Jarecki" in the search box. It's unusual enough that I figured I wouldn't be overwhelmed with hits.

This was a good choice.  I got 43 hits, a reasonable number to skim through.  Most of the results were for Jareckis I had never heard of.  But the 7th item on the first page was somebody familiar:

Seymour T. Jarecki search result at ArchiveGrid

Image of Seymour Jarecki found
via ArchiveGrid.

That's the same Seymour Jarecki I wrote about a couple days ago. Clicking on the link, it took me to the Denver Public Library's digital collections, where I found, as promised, a high school picture of Seymour Jarecki.  The page also provided data about the provenance of the picture. It is a studio portrait from an 1889–90 Denver High School album.  Unlike our modern, printed yearbooks, this was a photo album full of mounted pictures of various students.

This picture wasn't an entirely new find. The same image is on Seymour Jarecki's Find A Grave page. But on Find A Grave there is no information about where the picture came from.

So in about five minutes I found some useful information about a relative. I'm sure ArchiveGrid won't always provide such good results, but it's definitely a tool I will keep using!