Mary Short's album

Pages of a “Ward’s Album for Unmounted Photographs” (no. 912/39), its printed label altered in ink to “Mary Short’s Album,” with “Mary I. Short” written in white on the endpaper (page 1). Mary Isabella Short, sister of Ruth (Short) Ellingwood, kept it; family knowledge has the pictures taken at the Short family’s summer place on a lake, perhaps in Michigan or Ontario. They show dunes and pines, a long plank dock with lake steamers, a boathouse and a canoe, porches crowded with young men and women in white and straw boaters, and a party on a hilltop above the water.

Page 15 is labelled in blue ink, with arrows that cross: Beatrice Short at the left, Mary Short in the middle, and Ruth Short Ellingwood at the right, her arms raised over her head, standing on a plank in the shallows by a dock. Ruth looks fifteen to eighteen, which puts the picture about 1908-1911. Page 18 is captioned “Betty Ashcraft [?] at 13 [or 15] months, Lakeside”; Lakeside may name the place. Pages 19 and 20 are two real photo postcards of a spotted horse, “Kitty Bellairs,” addressed to “Miss Edith,” with ink on the page around them beginning “In memory of a famous …” Page 21 is a brick apartment building lettered “6636-38 Kimbark Ave.,” a street on Chicago’s South Side, captioned “May 1st - 1909 - April 24th - 1912”; whose home it was is not known.

Pages 2 to 12 were photographed in the same sitting, on the same grey pages, and are taken to be from the same album. The pages are in the order they were photographed in (Sept 2026), with the inside cover first, which may not be the album’s own order.