Photo by Linda Cadovius

Here we have another photo of Rose Vrana, the only living link to Permanent Record, taken at her home in Florida. I told Rose's story in an article that was published yesterday on Slate.

Several readers singled out this passage from the article:

[Rose] has four grandchildren but isn't in contact with them. "They know where I live, but I don't know where they live," she said. "It's sad, but what can you do. That's life."

One commenter on Slate wrote, "How sad that her grandkids are not in contact with her! ... Call your Grandmother, visit her!" Several other readers posted similar comments, and a few people sent expressed these same sentiments to me via e-mail.

The situation regarding Rose's grandchildren was a tricky one. I assume there's a lot more to that story than simply "They know where I live, but I don't know where they live," but Rose didn't seem inclined to elaborate and I didn't want to push her. At one point I sort of circled back to the subject, but she didn't want to go there, so I backed off.

Little old ladies make for inherently sympathetic figures, and the notion of cutting off contact with a 95-year-old grandmother seems hard to fathom, so it's easy to paint the grandchildren as being in the wrong here. But who am I to say? I don't know the backstory. As most of us have experienced in one way or another, family dynamics can be very complicated affairs.

But here's the kicker: Rose may not know where her grandchildren are, but I do. The same research that led me to her turned up two grandsons living in New York. If I wanted, I could hop on the subway and be knocking on their doors in less than an hour.

That's a tempting idea, but I won't be doing it. One of my guiding principles with Permanent Record has been to avoid reopening anyone's old wounds. Likewise, I considered telling Rose what I know, but I decided it isn't my place to do that. (She doesn't use a computer, so I don't have to worry about her seeing this blog post.) Maybe her grandchildren will see the Slate article and decide they want to contact her, or maybe not. Like Rose said, that's life.

My article about 95-year-old Rose Vrana (shown above in her report card portrait and in a recent snapshot) has finally been published on Slate. You can check it out here. Enjoy.

If you've been reading this blog for the past few months, you've no doubt noticed my repeated mentions of two research volunteers -- Samantha Bulgerin and Catherine Bloomquist. They're both much, much better researchers than I am, and it's no exaggeration to say that the latest phase of the Permanent Record project would not have been possible without them.

So today I'm giving Sam (that's her at the top of the page) and Cate (that's her beneath Sam) a well-deserved shout-out. I've also been wondering what inspired them to devote so much time and energy to my little project, so I invited them both to write a little something about that, and they both agreed. First up is Sam:

I’m a twenty-something college student in Wisconsin, studying anthropology and information studies. My father was an ancient history major, so I grew up in a house full of old books and artifacts. When I was about 12 or so, my grandmother introduced me to genealogy and I became fascinated by old records and what people leave behind. I started buying old photographs at rummage sales and trying to track down the people in them, wanting to know their stories. Letters, diaries, newspapers, and yearbooks soon joined the photographs. I also work at a local historical society and run two history-based blogs (one of which is about vintage fashion, which is a good fit with all the dressmaking students whose report cards Paul found; the other is about old newspaper clippings and such), so it would be fair to say I'm very interested in the past.

I came across Permanent Record randomly, shortly after Paul had written his first articles for Slate last fall. When I saw his request for research help, I got very excited, so I got in touch with him and have been helping out with the project when time allows.

I cannot put into words how amazing it is to see my research help Paul uncover the stories of these extraordinary women. The Permanent Record project, to me, is a perfect example of how history isn’t just battles and names and dates -- it’s people. People who lived full and fascinating lives. People who deserve to be remembered.

Thanks, Sam. I literally couldn't do this without you!

Now here's Cate:

I owe my introduction to Permanent Record to my brother, who read the series on Slate and thought I would enjoy it. He was right! New York City immigrant culture of the early 1900s has always fascinated me, so these students' stories really spoke to me.

I wanted to help with the project because I love the idea of connecting these report cards to the students' families. And since I have a background in professional genealogical research/heir-searching (particularly NYC research), I felt I had some specific skills to offer. Discovering "Miss Kotter's" identity has been the biggest thrill so far, and I hope we'll hear more about her. Thanks for letting me be part of Permanent Record!

Thank you, Cate -- you and Sam are the best.

Seriously, at the risk of getting too sappy here, Sam and Cate exemplify the incredible generosity of spirit that I've encountered throughout the Permanent Record project. That applies to the families I've interviewed, the historians who've helped me connect the various dots, and the many readers who've chimed in with observations and tips along the way. I'm grateful all these people -- but especially to Sam and Cate. I hope I get to meet them in person one day. First round will definitely be on me.

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Slate update: Been wondering when the next full-length PermaRec article would finally appear on Slate? I'm happy to report that the article has finally been put into the editorial pipeline and is now scheduled to be published either later this week or early next.

My editor says he wants to run additional PermaRec articles on Slate roughly every month, so I should finally be able to start telling the full stories that I've only hinted at here on the blog. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I'm starting a Permanent Record e-mail list, which I'll use to let people know about new Slate articles and other new developments regarding the project. (Don't worry, I won't be sending out daily spam or anything like that.) If you'd like to be added to the list, contact me.

Last month I posted the audio of my appearance on WFMU's excellent Seven Second Delay radio show, which was broadcast live from a theater in Manhattan. Now, as you can see above, it turns out that there's video of the show as well.

My segment begins at about the 11:45 mark. They began by asking me about some of my other projects, but we finally get around to talking about Permanent Record at 14:35. Unfortunately, the discussion only lasts one minute from that point (it actually lasted much longer on the radio show, but the video has been heavily edited). If you want to hear the full interview segment, go back and check out the archived audio of the show.

As I noted when posting a photo from the radio broadcast a while back, the guy up on the cross is co-host Andy, who had promised to be crucified if the show met its pledge drive goal, which it did. He was mortified that he actually had to follow through on his promise and spent a good portion of the show apologizing to anyone who might be offended.

Special thanks to WFMU producer Mike Noble, who booked me on the show, let me know about the video, and is generally a swell guy.

Photo from forgottenbookmarks.com; click to enlarge

No, I didn't find the lists of birthdays and death dates that are shown above. A guy named Michael Popek found them. He runs a used book store and often discovers things tucked away inside of old books, which he chronicles on his blog, Forgotten Bookmarks. Last fall he published a book by that same title. (As for the lists shown above, Popek found them inside a book of Shakespeare.)

As you may recall, about a month ago I ran an item about a 49-year-old note found inside a book. The guy who found that note successfully tracked down the fellow who'd written it. But Michael Popek doesn't try to connect the dots or reconstruct the stories of behind the objects he finds -- he just lets them speak for themselves.

And that's fine, because he finds a lot of them. He's been blogging about this stuff since 2007, during which time he's amassed over 1000 entries. If he tried to trace the backstory of each one, he'd end up so far down the rabbit hole that he'd never get back out.

So what does he find besides lists of dates? A small sampling: Snapshots. ... Recipes. ... Magazine clippings. ... Bus tickets. ... Postcards. ... Receipts (I really like that one). ... Letters -- sometimes handwritten, sometimes typewritten. ... Legal documents. ... Drawings (that's another of my favorites). ... Four-leaf clovers. ... Maps. ... And yes, as the blog's name implies, bookmarks (and what a beauty that one is!).

Sorry about all those links, but Forgotten Bookmarks is kind of addictive, so it's easy to get carried away. Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed not to have known about Popek's project until Kirsten Hively told me about it a few days ago. Just poke around anywhere on his site -- you're bound to find interesting stuff. (He also does used book giveaways on a regular basis, which is very nice.)

I haven't yet gotten my hands on a copy of Popek's book, but I plan to find a used copy. And I'm going to be seriously bummed if there's nothing lurking inside of it.

Click to enlarge

I collect lots of vintage meat-related ephemera -- old butchery catalogs, old butcher shop photos, old recipe booklets with the word "Meat" in the title (I have about 60 of those), and so on. So when I recently came across an eBay listing for an old looseleaf binder filled with assorted Armour Meat Products brochures, I pounced.

But what I didn't realize, because the eBay seller didn't mention it in the auction listing, was that the materials in the binder had been used by an Armour sales trainee in 1947. His name was Harry E. Counts, and his certificate for having completed his sales training, which I found buried in the back of the binder, is shown above.

The binder also included more than 80 pages of notes, all in pencil, presumably taken down by Harry during his training -- very Permanent Record! The notes are actually much more interesting than the printed brochures. Much like the case of the vintage coat with the bounced check and shopping lists in the pocket, I once again bought something that I thought was pretty cool and ended up with something else even cooler.

Harry didn't have the best handwriting, but it's good enough to get a sense of the sales class he was taking, which was apparently geared toward giving the trainees a grounding in modern butchery practices and Armour's product line. Given the volume of the notes, the class must have taken at least a week.

A lot of Harry's notes read like Livestock 101. Here's a page explaining the difference between a steer, a heifer, a cow, a stag, and a bull (note Harry's spelling of "castraded"; you can click on all of these photos to see larger versions):

And here's one describing the various types of turkeys, ducks, and geese:

Here's some good info on fresh and smoked sausages (I especially like the designation toward the bottom of the second page -- "Loaf Goods"):

Fun facts -- no, really! -- about lard:

I'm sure it would have been interesting to have sat in the back of the room on the day the class learned about variety meats, tongues, kidneys, ox tails, and "fries" (i.e., testicles -- or as Harry spelled it, "testicals"):

One of my favorite notes is on this page, which begins with "Wisconsin Cheese -- Is not made in Wisconsin":

And who was all of this knowledge and expertise aimed at? Why, Mrs. Consumer, of course:

And so on. If you want more, I photographed over 50 of the pages and gathered them into this set.

Toward the end of the binder is a list of the names and addresses of the "guys in school," also described as "List of Drunks" -- presumably Harry's fellow trainees. As you can see, they're all from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas:

And here's the oddest thing of all: The very last page in the notebook has instructions for a pyramid scheme fueled by a chain letter, purporting to "bring you and your friends a sizable nest egg in a very short time. Take a look:

Interestingly, the last person in the chain -- O.D. Stephens of 1312 Cypress St. in Pine Bluff, Arkansas -- was also one of Harry's classmates. Was Harry playing his friends for suckers? And why was something like this in his sales training notebook?

Nearly all the chain mail addresses are from Pine Bluff, so I'm assuming Harry was probably from there as well. And of course we know he worked for Armour. Unfortunately, some quick Googling based on those parameters failed to turn up anything, and I don't have time right now to go digging through census records and other resources. But if anyone reading this wants to track down Harry, I'd like to know more about him.

As you've probably heard, the 1940 census was released to the public earlier this week, and the response was so great that the National Archives' web site crashed on Monday.

One of the people trying to access the site that day was Cate Bloomquist, one of the volunteer researchers who've been helping me with PermaRec 2.0. She thinks the newly available data in the 1940 census may be very helpful to Permanent Record, so I asked her to talk a bit about how the census fit into her research:

Censuses are extremely important to genealogical research in general, but particularly to the Permanent Record project, because the census provides us with the names of other family members to trace forward. Since the Manhattan Trade students were female and many of them married, tracing them forward has been difficult. The censuses provide us with branches to trace forward, with the hope of locating a living person off that branch who can lead us back to the branch we're looking for. Censuses also provide valuable information regarding dates/places of birth, immigration dates, naturalization dates, how many years married, how many children died vs. lived, occupation, etc.

My piece of advice for people doing census research: Whether you're using the index compiled by Ancestry.com or the more traditional soundex, never trust a "nil" result in the index. People were often incorrectly indexed -- and it's not always the fault of the indexer. Have you ever looked at some of the census handwriting?! So if you don't find your family in a search of the census index, always, always try an alternative way of finding them. It involves a little more work -- you might have to look up a known address manually or perhaps look up a neighbor from a previous census to see if they are still neighbors -- but I would say I am able to locate someone by one of these alternative searches at least 50% of the time, even if they did not show up in the index.

And that's why Cate is such a great researcher (and maybe why I'm such a poor researcher, because I get frustrated easily when I don't find what I'm looking for).

The census is an interesting decennial ritual. Although there's no law requiring a person to respond to the census, the actual taking of the census by the federal government is mandated by Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states, "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct." (Do other countries have similar protocols?)

And why is the data from the 1940 census being revealed now? According to a Census Bureau spokeswoman quoted in this article, "In 1952, the director of the Census Bureau and the National Archivist agreed that keeping census records private for 72 years balanced public release of federal records with the tradition of confidentiality." So the 1940 census has come out from under the 72-year umbrella this year, the 1950 census will become available in 2022, and so on -- another decennial ritual. It creates a cyclical rhythm for genealogists and researchers (and, presumably, for Ancestry.com's subscriber patterns).

All of which brings us back to Cate Bloomquist, who turns out to have a very personal reason for being interested in the 1940 census: "I'm looking forward to looking up my dad. He was six years old in 1940, so this is the first census I will be able to see him in. He is currently suffering from Alzheimer's but is mostly sharp enough still that he can appreciate the census, and I look forward to sharing it with him."

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I'll get back to report cards soon, but first I'm excited to report that I've just acquired some amazing old documents that have Permanent Record written all over them: a stack of New York City real estate paperwork (mortgages, deeds, etc.) from the 1850s and ’60s! It's amazing stuff. I just need to find time to go through all of it. More details soon.

Sometimes I'll be talking or e-mailing with someone about Permanent Record, and I'll mention some specific aspect of the project and then say, "You know, like in the movie." And the other person will often say, "What movie?"

The movie I'm referring to in these situations is Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a 16-minute silent film that was shot in 1911. It's a remarkable document of the school where my report collection came from. As you can see in screen shots shown above, in some scenes you can actually read what's written on the blackboard! (Here's my favorite example of that.) It's another example of how incredibly lucky I was to have found report cards from such a special, well-documented school, instead of just any old school.

I described the movie and linked to it in the third article from last year's Slate series. But when I mention it to fans of the series, they're usually unfamiliar with it. Maybe they didn't bother to click on the link to the movie, or maybe they meant to come back to it and watch it later but never got around to it. Either way, anyone interested in PermaRec should definitely see this film, so I've decided to link to it again (there's no way to embed it, unfortunately) -- check it out.

A few notes:

• As you'll see on the page where the movie hosted, you have a choice of watching the film with commentary or without. The commentary, from a cinema professor, is interesting and provides some good insights, but it also contains some factual errors. I recommend watching the comment-free version first.

• It's not clear why the film was made -- maybe just for promotional purposes, or perhaps to assist in soliciting donations.

• The background music heard in the video version of the film was added in 2006. The original film was silent.

• The film follows the progress of several Manhattan Trade students. Unfortunately, none of those girls is represented in my report card collection.

• In 1911, when the film was shot, Manhattan Trade was at the second of its three locations, at 209-213 East 23rd Street. It had moved to this address from its original location -- a townhouse on West 14th Street -- in 1906. About 40% of the students in my report card collection attended Manhattan Trade while it was at the location shown in the film. (In 1918 the school would move again, to the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 22nd Street. That building is still in use today as a high school, with its original "Manhattan Trade School for Girls" lettering chiseled into the façade.)

• The very end of the film shows customers at a retail boutique. Although it isn't explained in the film, this was an outlet shop just off the school's lobby where students could earn extra money by selling the clothing they'd made for class assignments.

Okay, enough of my chatter -- enjoy the film.

Click to enlarge

At top is a photo of Eva Greene Rosencrans, who studied dressmaking at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls nearly 100 years ago; beneath her is a shot of her son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Margie Rosencrans, holding Eva's report card. Bob and Margie say Eva didn't talk much about her time at the school, but it must have been important to her, because she saved her diploma, awarded when she was not quite 17 years old. It was the highest level of formal education she would achieve.

The most notable line in Eva's report card is the final entry in her work-placement record, which indicates that she'd begun working for a "Mrs. Rosenstein." That would be Nettie Rosenstein, a young Austrian immigrant who'd begun making a name for herself in the fashion world. Nettie and Eva would be professionally and personally linked for the next 45 years, as Nettie became a top fashion designer and Eva stayed on as her business partner and top creative assistant and also married Nettie's brother.

Nettie Rosenstein's prestige grew in 1953, when she designed Mamie Eisenhower's inaugural ball gown -- or at least that's the party line. The truth is that Nettie had turned over most of the design work to Eva by this point, and it was Eva -- not her famous sister-in-law -- who designed the First Lady's gown. She designed another one for the Eisenhowers' second inaugural in 1957.

Today the Nettie Rosenstein label is highly sought after by vintage clothing aficionados, even though it was actually Eva -- drawing up on the dressmaking skills she learned at Manhattan Trade -- who designed much of the company's clothing. Most people never realized this, even at the time. At 1950s runway shows, it was Nettie who'd come out at the end and take a bow, while Eva, who'd actually created the designs that had just been presented, stayed off in a corner. But Bob and Margie say she never minded this. "She had very little ego," Bob told me. "She was happy to do her job. She was very good at it, but her real focus was always her family, not her career, so professional accolades didn't matter that much to her."

I look forward to telling more of Eva's story in a feature-length article later this year.

(Special thanks to volunteer researcher Samantha Bulgerin for laying the groundwork for this piece, and to my longtime friend Robin Edgerton for assisting with my interview of Bob and Margie Rosencrans.)

Yesterday I was walking around Brooklyn and heard someone call out, "Hey!" I turned and saw a carpenter named Gary, who I used to hang out with at a bar we both frequented. We hadn't seen each other in years, maybe longer (he admitted that he couldn't even remember my name, which is why he'd simply said, "Hey!"), so it was a nice surprise to encounter him there on the street.

Gary was standing in front of a storefront. "Is this your carpentry shop?" I asked. He said yes and offered to give me a quick tour. He was particularly eager to show me a bunch of artifacts that the shop's previous tenants had left behind in the basement, including a bunch of old stamping/embossing dies. Gary said they were for old-fashioned analog credit card machines (you know, the ones where the merchant would put your card in a metal bracket thingie and then run a slider over it), although I'm not convinced of that.

Whatever the dies were for, Gary had dozens of them, mostly for local businesses. One of them, shown above, really spoke to me -- "Atlas Putty Co." Sounds like the very embodiment of light-industrial Brooklyn, no? Since the address on the die includes a zip code, the die can't be all that old (zip codes weren't introduced until 1963 and didn't come into common usage until the early 1970s), but something about "Atlas Putty Co." has more of a 1930s or ’40s. feel to it. I suspect that's when the company was founded.

There's something inherently amusing about the word putty -- it feels sort of diminutive and playful. Is this simply because of the toy Silly Putty, or is it the word itself? In any case, the notion of an entire company devoted to putty seems endearingly quaint (although, of course, someone has to make the stuff).

From what I can tell, Atlas Putty is no longer operating in Brooklyn. Some quick internet searches came up dry, and Google Maps shows the address as a plain warehouse space.

There's a company called Atlas Putty in Illinois, however. This "other" Atlas has even snagged what is presumably the definitive putty-related web domain name, putty.com (although they haven't exactly made the most of it). Could this be the same company as the Brooklyn operation? Curious to find out, I called the Illinois Atlas, where the very pleasant woman who answered the phone told me, "No, we've always been here in Illinois."

So what became of the Atlas Putty in Brooklyn? If I spent a bit more time digging, I'm sure I could find out, but I don't have time for that right now, plus I kind of like it sometimes when things are left unresolved -- it's a little more mysterious that way, which lets us project our own imagined versions of what happened. Maybe Atlas Putty was a Mob front, for example (laundering cash via putty -- hey, stranger things have happened), and it went out of business when the owner was busted by the Feds. I'm gonna stick with that storyline until someone comes up with the real one.

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Wondering when I'll get back to talking about report cards? Soon. This weekend I'm driving up to Connecticut to interview the son of Eva Greene, who attended the Manhattan Trade School for Girls nearly 100 years ago. She went on to work for her sister-in-law, Nettie Rosenstein, who was a famous fashion designer. Nettie is credited with having designed Mamie Eisenhower's 1953 inaugural ball dress, but I've been told that Eva -- the former Manhattan Trade student -- was actually doing most of the company's design work at that point, including the Mamie dress. I'm looking forward to hearing the full story this weekend.

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Wondering when Slate will finally publish the next full-length Permanent Record article? You're not the only one. Grrrrr.

Click photos to enlarge

At its heart, Permanent Record is about found objects with stories to tell. Although the project has focused on old report cards and other printed ephemera, the same sort of sleuthing and storytelling can be done with other types of objects.

Case in point: I collect vintage sports uniforms, many of which I find on eBay. My most recent acquisition is the one you see above, a gorgeous baseball jersey from a team sponsored by -- or perhaps comprised of employees from -- a business called Lamanna Florist. Judging by the style and material, I'd say it's from the 1950s or early ’60s.

There's no indication of where Lamanna Florist was located, although the jersey itself was made by a Brooklyn company, which means Lamanna was probably situated in the Northeast. (A team in, say, Chicago, would likely have ended up with uniforms from a Midwestern supplier, because that's who the team's local sporting goods shop probably ordered from.) Some quick internet research revealed the following:

• There was a John Lamanna Florist in Syracuse. That's close enough to Brooklyn -- I'd be willing to bet that that's the shop connected to the jersey.

• The address listed on that postcard -- 101 South Warren Street -- is now a medical office, and I can't find any other address listing for the florist, so it's apparently no longer in business.

• The owner of that shop, John Lamanna, endorsed Penzoil Motor Oil in a 1961 ad (use the zoom function to get a better look).

• Here's a 2008 article a Syracuse resident named John Lamanna. This is not the Penzoil fan -- the article mentions "his father, Joseph Lamanna ... who used to own John Lamanna and Sons Florist." So this John is probably the nephew or grandson of the shop's eponymous founder.

I'd like to know more about the Lamanna Florist baseball team, and I figure John Lamanna might get a kick out of seeing photos of the jersey, so I came up with what I think is the right phone number for him and gave a call. Got his voicemail, left a message. No response yet, but I'm hoping.

The Lamanna jersey isn't the only interesting uniform find I've recently come across. Last week I acquired this softball jersey (click for larger images):

Lots of history in this one. Local 507 was formed in Cleveland in 1966 and helped launch Jackie Presser on the path that would eventually lead him to the Teamsters presidency (and also to a heavy involvement with organized crime, a role as an FBI informant, a Federal indictment, etc.). The jersey lists Presser’s title as Secretary-Treasurer, indicating that it’s from the late 1970s.

I'm a small-ish guy (5'8", 150 lbs.), yet this jersey fits me perfectly, which means it must have belonged to one of the smallest Teamsters in organized labor history.

Photo by Jon Augustine, the Daily Nebraskan

What you see above is a book from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's library and a note that was recently found inside of it. The note reads:

David Erbach used this June 12 1963. Just for kicks, drop me a note at 2979 Dudley. I am curious just how often this vital info is perused.

Wow -- very Permanent Record, right? As described in this article, the note was recently found by a UNL professor named Richie Graham, who decided to track down David Erbach. Erbach appears to have been delighted by the connection (“It’s like putting a note into a bottle and chucking it into the ocean,”) but doesn't recall having written the note, which is a shame.

Library books don't need to have 50-year-old notes hiding within their pages in order to be Permanent Record-ish, incidentally. For example, I recently acquired several dozen of these old library check-out cards (click image to enlarge):

The handwritten names, the typewritten book titles, the ink-stamped dates -- it's a potpourri of data styles. These cards are from the library at one of America's more exclusive prep academies. I purchased them from a woman on Etsy who works in that library and told me she harvested the cards "one by one from old books" as the library's operations were digitized and the cards were no longer needed. If you want some for yourself, she continues to sell them here. (You can also get someone's personal library card from long ago.)

I haven't tried to track down any of the students whose names appear on the check-out cards. Just seeing them there is satisfying enough.

(Special thanks to Robert Eden for pointing me toward the UNL story.)

Recognize the gentleman shown above? It's the fashion designer Calvin Klein, who's about the last person I'd expect to have a connection to Permanent Record.

Klein's name came up a few days ago, when I was interviewing a woman named Stephanie Wilson. She's the granddaughter of Beatrice Gross Zelin, who studied dressmaking at Manhattan Trade in the mid-1920s and is now deceased. As Ms. Wilson explained to me, Beatrice went on to become a teacher and then a placement advisor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where one of her students was Calvin Klein. In fact, one of Beatrice's more prized possessions was a blazer that Klein had made as part of his FIT senior project. (Ms. Wilson recently arranged to donate the blazer to Klein's company, where it will be featured in a historical exhibit about Klein and his career.)

Beatrice also co-authored several books on pattern-making, some of which are still in print. By coincidence, my upstairs neighbor is a young pattern-maker who works in the fashion district in Manhattan, so I asked her if she was familiar with these books. She immediately pointed at one of them and said, "It's on my shelf right now! It's one of the standard books in the field."

All of which is to say that Beatrice, who came from extremely modest means (according to her granddaughter, the family had to go to another house to bathe), really made the most of her Manhattan Trade School training. While the school's founders would no doubt be thrilled to hear how successful she became, they weren't really trying to prepare girls for professional careers. They just wanted to give them basic skills to help them survive in a blue collar environment. It's a testament to Beatrice's talent and ambition that she was able to go much further than that. I'll tell her story in more detail in a future article on Slate.

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Speaking of Slate, some of you have asked (and others among you are probably wondering) when Permanent Record will resurface there. Good question. I actually delivered a full-length article a few weeks ago, but my editors are overworked, so the wheels are turning slowly. My hope is that we'll get that article up in a week or so. After that, I hope to have new Slate articles roughly every six weeks. But again, my editors will have the final say on that.

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Meanwhile, for those of you in the New York area, here's something that might interest you: For the past year or so I've been hosting a monthly event called Open Mic Show-and-Tell, which is exactly what it sounds like: Anyone can show up with an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes. Some people bring objects that are very Permanent Record-ish -- found ephemera, family records and heirlooms, etc. -- and many of the stories are amazing.

The next Show-and-Tell event is this Thursday, March 15, 7:30pm, at Cabinet magazine's exhibit space in Brooklyn. Admission is free, and so is the beer (!). You can either bring an object to talk about or just be part of the audience (because you can't have show-and-tell without people to be shown and told). Either way, it's a good time. Full details here.

Click to enlarge

I had fun last night talking about Permanent Record, along with some other projects, on WFMU's excellent Seven Second Delay show, which is broadcast live from a small theater in Manhattan. That's me in the center, in the blue jeans and light green shirt. The guy up on the cross is co-host Andy, who had promised to be crucified if the show met its pledge drive goal, which it did. He was mortified that he actually had to follow through on his promise and spent a good portion of the show apologizing to anyone who might be offended.

Here's the audio of my segment, which lasts maybe 10 minutes:

Click to enlarge

Here we have Judy Helrich (left) and her sister, Marilyn Saias, holding the report card of their mother, Doris Abravaya, who attended the Manhattan Trade School for Girls in the early 1930s.

As you may recall, Doris is the student whose record read like a horror story:

May 2, 1933: Doris's mother is insane and in Mental State Hospital. Father is paralyzed and crippled and a drunkard. Three children [including Doris] live in [a forster home]. … Doris has low mentality and is very timid and unstable. She constantly fears becoming like her mother. Children see mother often because father takes them there whenever he is intoxicated.

And that's just a snippet of the challenges described in Doris's file. By any measure, she was dealt a rough hand.

On Sunday I met with Judy and Marilyn for the first time (we had been e-mailing for the past month or so), and I'm pleased to report that the Doris went on to have a very happy, successful life that gave few hints of the challenges she faced during her childhood. Interestingly, Judy and Marilyn had no idea that their grandfather (who they never met) was an alcoholic, or that their grandmother (who Marilyn never met and Judy met only once, when she was very young) was confined to a mental institution. Doris didn't talk much about those aspects of her life. So my interactions with Judy and Marilyn have been as much of a learning experience for them as it's been for me. I love it when that happens.

Doris's case is probably the strongest example so far of a trope I've been aware of since the start of this project: An adult's assessment of a child -- whether in the form of a report card or in any other format -- is not necessarily that child's destiny. It certainly wasn't in Doris's case. I'm looking forward to telling her full story in a future article on Slate.

Incidentally, I'm slowly building a nice little gallery of these portraits of people posing with their ancestors' student records. You can see the ones I've shot so far here.

Click to enlarge

On the left is Rose Baggini, age 15, as shown on her Manhattan Trade School report card in 1932; on the right, Rose Baggini Vrana, age 95, in her Florida home on March 3, 2012.

Rose is the first -- and so far only -- living connection to Permanent Record. I interviewed her by phone a few weeks ago but didn't know what she looked like because she doesn’t own a camera or a computer. Fortunately, I was able to arrange for one of Rose's friends, Linda Cadovius, to take a photo of her and e-mail it to me. Linda, whose parents were close with Rose, lives nearby and looks in on her from time to time. Big thanks to her for serving as Permanent Record's first remote photographer.

My article about Rose will be appearing on Slate shortly -- stay tuned.

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Update: Remember all that stuff that I found in the pocket of an old jacket? I contacted the vintage shop where I bought the jacket and told them the whole story. "We receive a lot of merchandise, so we usually just pat down the items instead of checking each pocket," the owner told me. "I'm sure we've sold back hundreds of stray dollars and coins over the years." So much for my theory that they put random ephemera in random pockets, just for fun.

Meanwhile, my thanks to everyone who weighed in on the question of whether I should contact Ann Marie Kroznuski (the widow of the man whose stuff was in the pocket). For the record, my whole "Should I get in touch with her?" thing was meant to be rhetorical -- I don't plan to contact her.

Why not? Mainly because I think doing so would be selfish. When I track down a report card family, I gain information from them but I also provide lots of information for them regarding their ancestors, so it feels like a fair exchange. That's one of my favorite things about Permanent Record -- I'm giving as well as taking. But if I were to contact Ann Marie Kroznuski, it would probably be interesting for me (I'd get to ask her questions about the jacket, about her late husband, etc.), but what would she get out of it? A reminder of a check that she bounced years ago? Feels like a pretty one-sided interaction, which wouldn't be fair to her. So I don't think I'll be going there.

Click on photos for larger versions

On Tuesday I bought a new pair of gloves. When I got them home, I decided I didn't like the color, so the next day I brought them back and exchanged them for a different pair. On my way back from the glove exchange, I decided on a whim to stop at a vintage shop in my neighborhood, where I came across this old jacket. I liked the cut and the fit, but I don't usually wear pale colors, so I wasn't sure about it. As I was trying it on, I felt something in one of the front pockets, so I reached in and pulled out a small wad of papers, all folded up. I didn't unfold them, but I could see that several of them had handwritten notes and appeared to be yellowed with age.

That was enough for me. I put everything back in the pocket and bought the jacket.

When I got home, I examined this new stash of ephemera, beginning with the check that's shown at the top of this entry. As you can see, it was written to pay a phone bill, but it bounced. It's not a report card, obviously, but it nonetheless feels very Permanent Record -- an old document of someone's personal details. How does this stuff keep finding me?

Naturally, I began searching for Ronald and Ann Marie Kroznuski. It turns out Ronald passed away just a few months ago in South Carolina, but Ann Marie is still alive. It feels odd to know that she bounced a check 36 years ago -- a small record of shame to which I'm privy (and now you are, too).

So what else was in the jacket pocket? For starters, a time card from Ronald's job:

No indication of what the job was, which is semi-maddening. Would it have killed Ronald's company to put its name on the time card?

There were also two short grocery shopping lists. One of them was on the back of a small (2.5" square) Woolco sales slip:

The other shopping list was on written on the flap of an envelope (hey, just like the Gettysburg Address, right?):

Next up, a receipt for a gallon of paint at Sherwin-Williams -- "Tivoli Green Accent 4492":

That paint color corresponds to one of the hues on this swatch strip, which has some basic arithmetic on the back:

Green, incidentally, has been my favorite color ever since I was a little boy -- another sign, if you choose to believe in such things, that this stuff was meant for me.

One final item -- a pocket calculator user's manual:

Hmmm -- if the Kroznuskis had a calculator, why did they have to do math on the back of the swatch strip? Maybe the latter inspired the purchase of the former.

That's it.

Did the jacket once belong to the Kroznuskis? If so, had these cards and papers been sitting in the pocket for 36 years until I found them a few days ago? And what about the staff of the shop where I bought the jacket -- don't they go through the pockets of a garment before putting it out on the racks? Maybe they found this stuff in the pocket but decided to leave it there, thinking it might make a nice bonus prize for the jacket's new owner? Or maybe they randomly seed their vintage clothing with assorted detritus, just because it's fun?

Meanwhile, should I contact Ann Marie Kroznuski? Should I just pack all of this stuff into an envelope and send it to her, with a note explaining how I found it? Should I send the material back anonymously, with no note? Or should I just leave her alone and enjoy these latest artifacts to find their way into my orbit?

Finally, consider this: What if I had bought the right color of gloves from the start?

Meet Maibelle Denegall and her brother, Eugene Denegall. They're holding the report card of their mother, Mailbelle Palmer Denegall, who attended the Manhattan Trade School for Girls nearly 100 years ago. Two of her sisters and one of her cousins also attended Manhattan Trade (I have the student record for one of the sisters, Julliette Palmer Dudley), making them the Manhattan Trade-iest family I've encountered so far in the course of this project.

I had the privilege of spending a few hours interviewing Maibelle and Eugene earlier today at Maibelle's home (chalk up another gold star for volunteer researcher Samantha Bulgerin, who laid the groundwork for this one). They're wonderful people, and I look forward to sharing their family's story in an upcoming Slate article.

Speaking of which: The first installment of PermaRec 2.0 (i.e., a new run of articles on Slate) should appear in a few weeks. It will focus on 95-year-old Rose Vrana, who attended Manhattan Trade in the early 1930s and is still alive in Florida. She's the first -- and so far only -- living link to Permanent Record that I've found. It turns out that she's also a link to lots of other things, but I'll save those details for Slate. More soon.

In the fourth installment of the Slate series from last September (or, as I'm now calling it, PermaRec 1.0), I spent a bit of time discussing the case of a student named Doris Abravaya, whose main card is shown above. Her full student record, which you can see here, told a heartbreaking tale of a very difficult childhood, typified by this entry:

May 2, 1933: Social worker, Mrs. Sklar, at Hebrew Sheltering and Guardian Society, came to see AK [Miss A. Kotter, the school's job placement counselor] about Doris. Doris's mother is insane and in Mental State Hospital. Father is paralyzed and crippled and a drunkard. Three children [including Doris] live in home of Mrs. Talianksy, obtained through the Society. There is severe unemployment in this home. When funds for Doris cease, on June 12, she will be entirely on her own. Doris has low mentality and is very timid and unstable. She constantly fears becoming like her mother. Children see mother often because father takes them there whenever he is intoxicated. Mrs. Sklar asked AK to try to include Doris in June graduation because not graduating would be such a disappointment.

There's more, most of it along those same lines. I was happy to see that Doris eventually got a clerical position that paid much better than the standard garment jobs that the school usually arranged for its students. Still, I worried for her, if it's possible to worry about someone who (a) you've never met and (b) is probably deceased already.

I wasn't able to find Doris's family during my research for PermaRec 1.0. But now, thanks to the work of volunteer researchers Catherine Bloomquist and Samantha Bulgerin, I've recently made contact with three of Doris's descendants -- a niece (who was named after Doris) and two daughters.

When Catherine and Sam pointed me toward the people they believed to be Doris's family, I was hesitant. Doris's story seemed so sad, and some of the things written in her student file were so harsh -- I feared that I might be stirring up bad memories.

But this wasn't the first time I'd faced this kind of decision. My rule for the project had always been to push forward and hope for the best. So I went ahead and contacted Doris's family.

And I'm really glad I did. Doris's niece and daughters have been fascinated by her student file -- in large part because it describes a girl who sounds very different from the smart, strong woman they knew. As it turns out, Doris had a good life despite the challenges she faced early on. I was -- I am -- extremely happy to hear that.

So far I've only had preliminary back-and-forths with Doris's family, but her daughters sound eager to tell her full story. And they live in the NYC area, so I hope to be able to meet with them in person soon and learn how Doris overcame her early hardships. I suspect it's going to be a very inspiring tale.

The top photo shows Donna Mitchell holding the report card of her grandmother, Anna Contino. Below her is Jane Montalto, who's posing with the report card of her mother, Florence Gattuso.

I interviewed Donna, Jane, and their respective families on Saturday. They were all incredibly gracious about welcoming me into their homes and sharing their stories with me. I hope to feature them in a future article for Slate.

Donna and Jane are among a bumper crop of Manhattan Trade families I've recently made contact with thanks to the efforts of volunteer researchers Catherine Bloomquist and Samantha Bulgerin. Several of these new contacts promise to be very special -- I'll have more info on some of them over the next few days. Stay tuned.