The Fraser's Box Which Contained Photographs

Provenance of a resource is a record that describes entities and processes involved in producing and delivering or otherwise influencing that resource. Provenance provides a critical foundation for assessing authenticity, enabling trust, and allowing reproducibility. Provenance assertions are a form of contextual metadata and can themselves become important records with their own provenance.

(From a website associated with University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute)

Some photographs from my parents’ archives were kept in a red gift box.  Some of these were photographs taken of relatives in Swedish-Finland by grandma's sister Marie in 1930.  Marie died in spring, 1939, she had lived with her parents next door to her sister and had worked at the Sperry Flour Mill test kitchen.  Along with the photos in the red gift box were photos that had belonged to John and Johanna Malm.   They died during the years of World War Two.  Then the photos belonged to my grandmother.  Marie also left a photo album.  My grandmother had these things, I believe my mother brought things to her house  to keep.

Fraser's Box That Contained Photos

I associate the red gift box with the 1950s and the 1960s.  Some nice gifts were given to my grandmother in those years, when I continued to visit with my mother every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon.  Boxes were stored with paper in a cupboard to the left of the kitchen door.  In the later grade school years and in junior high school my grandmother was sometimes in or out of the hospital.  My mother filled out forms for medicare for her or sorted things when we were there.  I believe she also brought letters to her house to keep.

I wonder if a description about the red box is provenance.  My provenance descriptions include this sort of information.  I put the photographs in a closing photo ring binder in archival pages and in a photo album with slide-in pages.  The red box fit a record album, so I stored my mother’s Swedish record albums in the red box.  A while back, the red box became time-worn.  I retained some of the box.  It was something I always called the Fraser’s box. 

As a note, my grandmother worked at a hat shop on Broadway, this was listed in a Tacoma City Directory before she married in 1905.  Fraser’s would have followed in the building when it was started in 1934.  The Fraser’s box at my grandmother’s might have created an emotional thought for her.  On her closet shelf were old hats with plumed feathers.