The Wanamakers / Warburtons and the Romanovs
I am a descendent of the John Wanamaker line from Philadelphia. Wanted to share these with you.
During the course of the Howard Lewis Project in our Archives department, the John Wanamaker collection [2188] received some much-needed attention in order to make the collection more accessible and easier to use for our researchers. As one of our larger collections (approximately 190 feet of material) that documents a very prominent Philadelphia citizen and the store he founded, the collection sees a great deal of use in our research library. It was determined that one of the things we could do to make the collection easier to use would be to take a detailed inventory of all the volumes in the collection and number them consecutively. Previously, the volumes had been numbered rather confusingly and were further obscured by the fact that some were housed in boxes with other materials and not listed separately in the finding aid. All volumes were removed from the boxes (except where they were fragile and in need of extra support) and given labels with their new numbers and titles that accurately reflect their contents.
It was in the course of these tasks that I began to notice that some of these volumes were very poorly or confusingly described. I realized that researchers looking at the finding aid (since the collection is located in our closed stacks and not directly accessible to our patrons) would likely have no idea as to their contents or any indication that they could be potentially useful. One of the most interesting results of this re-labeling of volumes was the discovery (or re-discovery) of material within the collection, especially former volume 20-24. On the shelf, this volume was labeled as “20-24 Mary Brown Wanamaker Europe trip, 1909.” The finding aid description was only slightly more helpful: “Scrapbooks and photo albums: Mary Brown Wanamaker: photo album, European Trip, 1909.” Seems fairly lackluster, right? Based on these titles, one could only surmise that the album contained photographs that maybe depicted members of the Wanamaker family somewhere in Europe. As with the other scrapbooks and albums, I had to open up the volume and sift through its contents to get a more specific and accurate title.
2nd image
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Tsar Nicholas II, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, and Grand Duchesses Xenia Alexandrovna, Tatiana Nikolaevna, and Olga Nikolaevna
3rd image
unkown Russian officer, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and unknown Russian cavlaryman
https://hsp.org/blogs/fondly-pennsylvania/of-wanamakers-and-romanovs-a-history-mystery-from-the-archives