This archive is culled from the collected photographs of two people, Mary Westmoreland Hudson and Martha Westmoreland Wooding. The majority of the archive's images came from the possession of Martha; she was not only a prolific amateur photographer but also scrupulously saved all kinds of family-related material. The love these two sisters had for their family and the importance they placed upon remembering their origins in North Carolina are the inspirations for the creation of the archive.

Most of the photographs were found loose and unsorted, in the form of mixed prints and nitrate negatives, but several were found pasted into small scrapbooks. Sadly, as both Mary and Martha had passed away by the time of the archive's conception, the chronology of the images and the identification of subjects and places seen in the photographs is for the most part a result of logic, guesswork, and cross-referencing -- detective work rather than personal memory. For this reason there may be various errors in the descriptions of the photographs; dating the images was particularly tricky.

Many of the prints were stamped with a number on the reverse in violet ink which facilitated their organization into groups. The nitrate negatives had been cut from contiguous rolls after they were developed, so by lining up and fitting together the individual frames like puzzle pieces, they could be sorted back into sequence. Close examination of the negatives -- the tiny hairs and dust particles on the edges of the frames and the unique shape of the cameras' apertures -- shows that many of these rolls of photographs were taken on the same camera. In some cases a given image was found in both Mary's and Martha's collections, either as two prints or a print and a negative; in other cases photographs from the two sister's separate collections were found to be sequential. This suggests that it was common for a single roll of negative film and its' prints to be split up between the Westmoreland children.

Several images in the archive exist both in negative and print form; typically the negative version has been chosen for inclusion since the quality of the prints has degraded more significantly over time. I have also chosen to scan the images as greyscale rather than as color images. While this method obscures the beautiful warm coloration of the prints, it results in what I believe to be a more purely photographic image (with a smaller file size) and allows uniformity between the negatives and prints.