The photograph seems ordinary at first.

Two girls in matching white dresses, their arms linked, smiling at the camera in a well-lit Chicago studio.

But one detail refused to leave the curator’s mind.

The shoes did not match.

Margaret Holloway had worked at the Chicago Historical Society for 17 years, and she had cataloged thousands of family portraits from the city’s early 20th century photography studios.

She knew what belonged and what did not.

This image had arrived in a donation box from an estate sale on the south side, mixed in with ledgers, correspondents, and promotional materials from a longdefunct child welfare agency called the Illinois Home Finding Association.

The girls looked about eight or nine years old.

Their hair was curled and pinned in the same style.

Their dresses were identical down to the lace collar and puffed sleeves.

They stood against a painted backdrop of a garden scene, the kind popular in studio portraiture of the era.

Everything about the composition suggested prosperity and care.

Everything except the shoes.

Margaret pulled the print closer under the magnifying lamp in her conservation lab.

The girl on the left wore leather button-up boots, polished and new.

The girl on the right wore something else entirely.

At first glance, they looked similar, but under magnification, Margaret could see the difference.

Rough canvas stitched by hand with uneven seams.

The toe box sagged slightly.

The sole appeared to be layered fabric rather than leather.

These were institutional shoes, the kind made in workrooms when budgets ran thin.

Margaret turned the photograph over.

On the back in faded ink, someone had written, “The Moyer twins placed together.

June 1919, success story for annual report.” But if these were twins from the same family, why would one have store-bought boots and the other handmade institutional shoes? Margaret set the photo down carefully.

This was not just a pretty old picture.

Something here was wrong.

Margaret had spent nearly two decades examining photographs that families wanted to forget or institutions wanted to reshape.

She had seen images scrubbed from collections because they showed uncomfortable truths about labor conditions, racial segregation, or the treatment of immigrants.

She had learned to read photographs the way a forensic investigator reads crime scenes.

Every object, every expression, every spatial relationship told a story, and often that story contradicted the caption.

She adjusted her scanner and photographed the print at high resolution, then carefully removed it from its cardboard mount.

The mount itself was printed material from the Illinois Home Finding Association with decorative borders and text that read, “Building Christian families through child placement.” The studio stamp on the front identified the photographer as Lind Holman Sons, a commercial outfit that had operated on South the State Street from 1915 to 1923.

Margaret examined the girl’s faces again.

They were smiling, but their eyes held something else.

The girl with the good boots looked directly at the camera with a practiced ease.

The girl with the canvas shoes looked slightly to the side, her smile tighter, her posture more rigid.

Margaret had seen that expression before in photographs of children from orphanages and industrial schools.

It was the look of someone told to smile, but not sure why.

She pulled out her notes on the Illinois Homefinding Association.

The organization had been founded in 1907 by a consortium of Protestant church leaders and progressive reformers who believed that orphaned and destitute children should be removed from large institutions and placed in rural homes where they could learn honest labor and Christian values.

The agency had operated for two decades before quietly dissolving in 1927.

This photograph had been part of their promotional materials.

Margaret felt the familiar weight of ethical obligations settle over her.

She could file this image with a neutral description and move on.

Or she could follow the questions that were beginning to form.

If these girls were not really twins, what were they? And why would a child welfare agency stage a photograph to make it look as though they were? Margaret started with the obvious leads.

She pulled the city directories for 1919 and located Lindholm and Sons at 438 South State Street in the heart of Chicago’s commercial photography district.

The studio specialized in family portraits and institutional work.

Their advertisements in the Tribune promised dignified portraiture for families, schools, and charitable enterprises.

She cross- referenced the Illinois Homefinding Association’s address and found their office had been on West Adam Street, just a few blocks from Hull House and the other settlement organizations that dominated Chicago’s reform landscape in the 1910s.

The proximity was not accidental.

These agencies formed a network sharing resources, donors, and ideas about how to manage the city’s poor.

Margaret contacted a colleague at Northwestern, a historian named Dr.

Robert Chen, who specialized in progressive era social welfare movements.

She scanned the photograph and sent it to him with a brief explanation.

He called her back within an hour.

“I know this organization,” Robert said.

His voice carried a cautious tone.

“The Illinois Home Finding Association was part of the Orphan Train Network, but they operated differently than the New York groups.

They focused on local placements within Illinois and the surrounding states.

They advertised heavily in church bulletins and rural newspapers promising families a source of domestic help in exchange for providing Christian guidance to needy children.

So it was labor placement, Margaret said.

Officially it was adoption or foster care, Robert replied.

But yes, functionally it was labor placement.

The children were expected to work.

The agency called it character building.

Girls went to farms or middle-class homes to do housework, laundry, cooking.

Boys went to farms for agricultural labor or to shops for apprenticeships.

Some families treated the children well.

Many did not, and the agency had very little oversight once a placement was made.

What about twins? Margaret asked.

Would they stage photographs to make unrelated children look like siblings? There was a pause.

I have seen promotional materials from similar agencies that emphasize sibling groups, Robert said slowly.

The pitch was that taking two children was better than one because siblings could comfort each other and the family would get twice the labor for only a modest increase in cost.

But I’ve never seen documentation of agencies fabricating sibling relationships.

If that is what this is, it would be significant.

Margaret thanked him and returned to the public records.

She searched for the name Moyer in Cook County Vital Records looking for twins born around 1910 or 1911.

She found three sets of Moyer twins in that window, but none matched the timeline.

Two sets had died in infancy.

The third set were boys.

She expanded her search to orphanage and institutional records.

The Chicago Orphan Asylum had ledgers digitized at the Newberry Library.

She requested access and spent an afternoon scrolling through intake records.

No Moyer twins.

She tried the Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Children’s School.

Nothing.

The Protestant Orphan Asylum.

nothing.

Then she found something in the records of the Cook County Juvenile Detention Home, a temporary facility where children were held while courts decided their fate.

In May 1919, a girl named Lena Moyer, aged nine, had been transferred from the detention home to the Illinois Homefinding Association after her mother was sentenced to the women’s reformatory in Joliet for theft.

No mention of a twin, no mention of any siblings at all.

Margaret pulled the census records for 1910 and 1920.

In 1910, Lena Moyer appeared as a one-year-old living with her mother, Alice Moyer, in a tenement on the west side.

Alice worked in a garment factory.

No father listed, no other children.

In 1920, Alice Moyer was enumerated at the Illinois State Reformatory for Women, and Lena was gone from the public record entirely.

So, Lena Moyer had been a real child, alone, placed by the agency in June 1919.

Who was the other girl? Margaret contacted the archivist at the Newberry and asked if they had any additional materials from the Illinois Home Finding Association.

The archivist, a woman named Patricia Quan, told her that a small collection had been donated in the 1970s by the daughter of one of the agency’s board members.

The collection had never been fully processed.

Patricia agreed to pull the boxes.

Margaret spent the next two days at the Newberry working through brittle correspondents, financial ledgers, and bundles of photographs.

She found contracts, hundreds of them, standardized forms with blanks filled in by hand.

The forms were titled agreement for the temporary care and Christian training of a child.

They stipulated that the receiving family would provide food, shelter, and education in exchange for the child’s labor in domestic or agricultural tasks.

The contracts ran for periods of 1 to 3 years, renewable at the discretion of the family and the agency.

The children received no wages.

At the end of the contract period, the family could choose to formally adopt the child or return them to the agency.

She also found correspondence between the agency’s director, a man named Reverend Harold Trimble, and various donors and board members.

In one letter dated March 1919, Trimble outlined a plan to increase donations by producing a new annual report with photographic evidence of successful placements.

He wrote, “Donors respond most favorably to images of children thriving in their new homes, particularly when siblings are placed together.

We must produce compelling visual stories that demonstrate the efficacy of our methods.” Margaret found another letter, this one from the AY’s bookkeeper to Reverend Trimble, dated May 1919.

It noted that the agency had only three sibling groups available for placement that spring, and two of those groups were boys unlikely to appeal to families seeking domestic help.

The bookkeeper suggested they focus promotional efforts on individual girls who were in higher demand.

Yet, in June 1919, the agency had produced a photograph of twins.

Margaret returned to the pile of photographs.

Most were individual portraits of children, stiff and formal.

A few showed children with their new families posed in front of farmhouses or in parlors.

Then she found a second print of the same photograph of the two girls, but this one had a different caption on the back.

Lena M.

and Dorothy K.

successful double placement demonstration for donors.

June 1919.

Dorothy K.

Margaret returned to the Juvenile Detention records and found her.

Dorothy Kowalsski, age 8, transferred to the Illinois Home Finding Association in April 1919 after her father died in an industrial accident and her mother was hospitalized for tuberculosis.

No siblings.

Lena Moyer and Dorothy Kowalsski were not twins.

They were two unrelated girls pulled from the detention system, dressed in identical clothing, and photographed together to create the illusion of a sibling placement.

The Illinois Homefinding Association had staged the image to appeal to donors and prospective families.

But why were the shoes different? Margaret contacted Dr.

Chen again and asked him to meet her at the Newberry.

When he arrived, she showed him both versions of the photograph in the record she had found.

He studied the images carefully, then leaned back in his chair.

“The shoes are the tell,” he said.

“They didn’t have matching shoes, so they made do.

Or maybe they did it on purpose, thinking no one would notice.

Look at the dresses.

Those are new.

Probably purchased specifically for the photograph.” The agency would have had a small wardrobe of nice clothing for promotional purposes, but shoes were expensive.

They couldn’t justify buying two pairs of matching boots for a single photograph.

So they put Lena, the girl who had been in the system longer, in institutional shoes and Dorothy, the newer intake, in whatever she had come in with.

Or Margaret said slowly.

Dorothy’s boots were borrowed or purchased, and Lena’s shoes reveal that she had already been institutionalized long enough to be given the standard orphanage footwear.

Robert nodded.

Canvas shoes stitched from scrap fabric were standard issue in state orphanages and detention homes.

They were cheap to produce and they wore out quickly, which meant children were constantly making new pairs in the workrooms.

It was considered rehabilitative labor.

Girls sewed shoes and mended clothing.

Boys worked in carpentry or the gardens.

Margaret thought about the two girls standing in the studio, arms linked, told to smile for the camera, Lena in her canvas shoes, Dorothy in borrowed boots.

Both of them were props in a promotional campaign designed to extract money from donors and extract labor from children.

She asked Robert if he knew what a double placement meant in the context of the agency’s work.

It meant placing two children with the same family.

He said the selling point was efficiency.

One family, two workers.

The agency could clear two cases at once and the family got a better return on their investment in terms of labor hours.

it was presented as an act of charity, but it was a calculated economic arrangement.

And if the children were not actually siblings, then the family was being deceived, Robert said.

But more importantly, the children were being used.

If they were told they were twins, or if they were simply told to pose as twins, they were being coerced into a fabricated identity for the benefit of the agency.

Their real histories, their real families were being erased.

Margaret sat with that for a long moment.

She thought about Lena’s mother in the reformatory, perhaps not even knowing where her daughter was.

She thought about Dorothy’s mother in the hospital, too sick to advocate for her child.

Both girls had been removed from their families, not because of abuse or neglect, but because of poverty and circumstance, and then they had been repackaged as a success story.

She asked Robert what he knew about the outcomes for children placed by agencies like this.

It varied wildly.

He said some children were treated well and genuinely adopted into families.

Others were worked like servants, denied education and returned to the agency when they became too old or too sick to be useful.

There are oral histories from survivors who describe being passed from family to family, never staying anywhere long enough to form attachments, always aware they were there to work.

The agencies called it Christian charity.

The children called it something else.

Margaret thanked Robert and returned to her office at the historical society.

She wrote up her findings and submitted a memo to her supervisor, a man named Gerald Pritchard, who directed the photography and prints department.

She explained what she had found and proposed an exhibition that would contextualize the photograph within the broader history of child welfare corruption in progressive era Chicago.

Gerald called her into his office 3 days later.

He had the memo on his desk along with printouts of the photograph and the supporting documents.

He looked uncomfortable.

“This is excellent research,” he said.

“But I need to think carefully about how we present this.

The Illinois Home Finding Association dissolved nearly a century ago, but some of the families involved were prominent.

The Trimble family, for example, still has descendants who are donors to this institution.

I don’t want to create unnecessary controversy.

Margaret kept her voice steady.

The controversy already exists, she said.

It’s in the photograph.

We’ve been displaying this image and others like it as charming examples of early studio photography.

We’ve been complicit in the sanitized narrative these agencies wanted to project.

If we don’t tell the truth now, we’re continuing that complicity.

Gerald sighed.

I understand your position, but we have to be strategic.

We can’t just put up an exhibition that accuses a donor’s great-grandfather of exploiting children.

We need to frame this carefully.

Focus on the systemic issues, not the individuals.

The systemic issues were created and maintained by individuals.

Margaret said, “Reverend Trimble ran this agency.

He wrote the letters.

He ordered the photographs.

He signed the contracts.

We can’t tell the systemic story without naming the people who built the system.” Gerald rubbed his temples.

Let me talk to the board.

In the meantime, keep researching.

Find more examples.

If we’re going to do this, we need to make the case that this was a widespread practice, not an isolated incident.

Margaret spent the next month in archives across the city.

She found similar photographs from other agencies, images of children posed with farming equipment or standing beside well-dressed families, captions that emphasized their transformation from destitute orphans to productive members of society.

She found contracts that stipulated children as young as six would work a minimum of eight hours per day in domestic service.

She found correspondence from families demanding the return of children who had become ill or refused to work.

She also found resistance in the records of a black Baptist church on the south side.

She discovered a folder of letters written by a pastor named Reverend James Mitchell in the early 1920s.

Mitchell had organized a group of parents and community members to challenge the placement practices of agencies like the Illinois Home Finding Association, arguing that they targeted black and immigrant children disproportionately and that the so-called Christian homes were often sites of exploitation and abuse.

His letters had been sent to city officials, state legislators, and the governor.

Most had gone unanswered.

One letter dated 1922 included a list of children from his congregation who had been removed from their families and placed by various agencies.

He wrote, “These children are not orphans.

They have parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who love them and want them home.

But because we are poor and because we are black, the courts have decided we are unfit.

The agencies say they are saving these children.

We say they are stealing them.” Margaret photocopied Mitchell’s letters and added them to her research file.

She contacted a professor of African-American history at Depal who specialized in black mutual aid networks and learned that Mitchell’s church had been part of a larger movement of black institutions that tried to protect their children from the child welfare system by creating their own foster networks and legal defense funds.

The movement had been largely unsuccessful because it lacked the political power and financial resources of the white-led agencies, but it had left a paper trail of resistance.

Margaret returned to Gerald Pritchard with her expanded research.

She showed him Mitchell’s letters and the records from other agencies.

She argued that the exhibition needed to center the voices of people like Reverend Mitchell, people who had seen the system for what it was and had tried to fight back.

Gerald agreed to convene a meeting with the board’s exhibitions committee.

Margaret prepared a presentation and waited.

The meeting took place in a conference room on the fourth floor of the historical society building.

Six board members attended along with Gerald and two other curators.

Margaret projected the photograph of Lena and Dorothy onto the screen and walked through her findings step by step.

She explained the shoes, the fabricated sibling relationship, the promotional purpose of the image.

She showed the contracts and the correspondence.

She quoted Reverend Mitchell’s letters.

One board member, a retired attorney named William Krenshaw, interrupted her.

I appreciate the thoroughess of this research, he said.

But I’m concerned about the implications.

Are we saying that every family who took in a child through these agencies was exploiting them? Because I know for a fact that some of these placements resulted in genuine adoptions and loving homes.

I’m not saying every family was abusive, Margaret replied.

I’m saying the system was exploitative by design.

The agencies commodified children.

They advertised them as sources of labor.

They staged photographs to manipulate donors and prospective families.

Some children may have ended up in good situations.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the system treated them as economic assets rather than human beings with rights and families of their own.

Another board member, a philanthropist named Elellanar Hartley, spoke up.

What about the children’s voices? Do we have any firstirhand accounts from Lena or Dorothy? Do we know what happened to them after this photograph was taken? Margaret shook her head.

I’ve tried to trace them, but the records are incomplete.

Lena Moyer disappears from public records after 1919.

Dorothy Kowalsski appears in the 1930 census as a domestic servant living with a family in Evston, but I have no way of knowing if that was a placement that became permanent or if she was still effectively working as unpaid labor.

Without oral histories or personal papers, we have to rely on the institutional records and those records are designed to obscure as much as they reveal.

Then we should be cautious about our claims.

Crenshaw said, “We can present the photograph and explain the context, but we should avoid making accusations we can’t fully substantiate.” Margaret felt her frustration rising.

“The institutional records substantiate exploitation,” she said.

“The contracts, the correspondence, the photographs themselves are evidence.

We don’t need a firstirhand testimony to say that dressing up two unrelated children as twins and advertising them as a double labor placement was unethical.” The evidence speaks for itself.

Gerald stepped in.

I think what William is saying is that we need to be mindful of how we frame this for a public audience.

We’re not writing an academic paper.

We’re creating an exhibition that will be seen by thousands of people, including families and school groups.

We need to be clear and factual without being inflammatory.

Telling the truth is not inflammatory, Margaret said quietly.

It’s necessary.

The room fell silent for a moment.

Then Ellanar Hartley spoke again.

“I support moving forward with the exhibition,” she said, “but I think we should include contemporary voices if possible.

Are there organizations working on child welfare today that could provide context about how these historical practices connect to current issues? Are there descendants of children placed by these agencies who might want to contribute their family stories?” Margaret nodded.

I can reach out to child welfare advocacy groups and genealogical societies.

I’ve already found one community historian on the south side who is researching families impacted by forced placements.

I’ll contact her.

The board discussed logistics for another 30 minutes, then voted to approve the exhibition with the understanding that Margaret would continue her outreach efforts and that the final text would be reviewed by a historian of child welfare to ensure accuracy.

Margaret left the meeting feeling both relieved and exhausted.

She had won the argument, but she knew the real work was just beginning.

She spent the next two months building the exhibition.

She contacted child welfare organizations and learned that the practices of the Illinois Homefinding Association, while extreme in their photographic staging, were not unusual for the era.

Thousands of children had been placed in homes where they were expected to work without wages, often under the guise of adoption or Christian charity.

The practice had continued in various forms well into the midentth century, rebranded as foster care, but still fundamentally shaped by economic calculations about the value of children’s labor.

She also contacted a genealogologist named Denise Patterson, who had been researching black families in Chicago who had lost children to the placement system.

Denise put her in touch with an elderly woman named Glattis Washington, whose aunt had been placed by the Illinois Home Finding Association in 1917.

Glattis agreed to be interviewed for the exhibition.

In the interview recorded in Glattis’s living room on a warm afternoon in September, Glattis spoke about her aunt, a girl named Ruth, who had been removed from the family after Glattis’s grandmother was arrested for working in an illegal speak easy during Prohibition.

Ruth had been sent to a farm downstate and forced to work in the fields in the kitchen.

She had tried to run away twice and been returned by the police.

She had finally been released at age 16 after her contract expired and had returned to Chicago.

She had never spoken in detail about her years on the farm, but she had never married and never wanted children of her own.

She used to say they stole her childhood.

Glattis said that’s the word she used, stole.

The agency told my grandmother they were saving Ruth, giving her opportunities she wouldn’t have in the city, but what they really wanted was free labor.

And when Ruth came back, she was different, harder.

She didn’t trust anyone.

Margaret included excerpts from Glattis’s interview in the exhibition text alongside the photograph of Lena and Dorothy.

She wrote captions that explained the shoes, the fabricated sibling relationship, and the broader context of child placement as labor exploitation.

She included Reverend Mitchell’s letters and documents from other agencies showing similar practices.

She also included contemporary statistics on children in the foster care system and the ongoing challenges of protecting children from exploitation within state care.

The exhibition opened in January 23.

It was titled Hidden Labor: Children and the Business of Reform in Progressive Era Chicago.

The photograph of Lena and Dorothy was the centerpiece displayed on the wall with a magnified section showing their mismatched shoes.

The opening reception was crowded.

Descendants of placed children attended, some seeing images of their relatives for the first time.

Academics and social workers came to see the documentation.

Journalists from local news outlets covered the story.

Margaret stood near the photograph and watched visitors lean in close, studying the shoes, reading the captions.

absorbing the implications.

One visitor, a woman in her ton 60s, stood in front of the photograph for a long time.

Finally, she approached Margaret and introduced herself as Karen Lindstöm.

She said her grandmother had been placed by the Illinois Home Finding Association in 1920 at age 7 and had worked as a domestic servant for a family in Oak Park until she was 18.

Her grandmother had told stories about being photographed for the agency’s promotional materials, about being dressed in clothes that were not hers and told to smile for strangers.

She said she never felt real in those photographs, Karen told Margaret.

She said they turned her into a prop.

When I saw this picture, I thought of her.

Those girls look just like she described.

Pretty dresses, fake smiles, and something wrong in the details.

if you look close enough.

Margaret thanked Karen for sharing her grandmother’s story and invited her to contribute to the exhibition’s oral history archive.

Karen agreed.

In the weeks following the opening, the exhibition received significant attention.

Several descendants of Reverend Harold Trimble contacted the historical society asking for the exhibition to be modified or removed, arguing that it unfairly maligned their ancestor.

Gerald Pritchard met with them and explained that the exhibition was based on documented evidence and that the historical society had an obligation to present historical truth even when that truth was uncomfortable.

The descendants threatened to withdraw their financial support.

The board stood behind the exhibition.

A local newspaper ran a feature story titled The Children Chicago Forgot: How Progressive Era Reform Masked Exploitation.

The story quoted Margaret extensively and included the photograph of Lena and Dorothy.

The article prompted other archives and museums to re-examine their own collections for similar images and materials.

Margaret received emails from researchers across the country who had found comparable photographs in their institutions.

Images of children posed to look like something they were not.

Images designed to sell a story that had little to do with the children’s actual experiences.

She began compiling a database of these images, working toward a larger project that would document the national scope of child placement as a form of labor exploitation.

She also finally traced what had happened to Lena Moyer through a combination of census records, city directories, and cemetery records.

She learned that Lena had been placed with a family in rural Illinois in 1919, had worked for them until 1924, and had then moved to Indiana, where she had worked in a hotel laundry.

She had married briefly in her 30s, but the marriage had ended.

She had died in 1967 in a county nursing home with no children and no listed survivors.

Her death certificate listed her occupation as domestic worker.

Dorothy Kowalsski’s trail was harder to follow, but Margaret eventually found a death record from 1953 in Milwaukee.

Dorothy had worked as a housekeeper for various families throughout her life.

She had never married.

Her death certificate listed a niece as the informant, suggesting that she had maintained some connection to her original family, but Margaret could find no further documentation of that relationship.

Margaret included these findings in a follow-up article published in a journal of public history.

She wrote, “Lena Moyer and Dorothy Kowalsski were photographed together in 1919 to create the illusion of a successful sibling placement.

In reality, they were two unrelated girls whose childhoods were interrupted by poverty, family crisis, and a child welfare system that valued them primarily as sources of labor.

Their mismatched shoes, barely visible in the original photograph, are the only evidence that survived of their separate identities.

For decades, viewers looked at this image and saw twins, saw success, saw charity.

Only by looking closely at the details the system could not fully control can we begin to see the truth.

The photograph remains on display at the Chicago Historical Society.

Visitors still lean in to study the shoes.

School groups use the image as a starting point for discussions about historical evidence and the ways institutions shape narratives.

Margaret occasionally leads tours and talks about the research process, about learning to read photographs against the grain, about the ethical obligation to question the stories that comfortable people tell about uncomfortable histories.

But the photograph itself asks no questions.

Lena and Dorothy stand frozen in their white dresses, arms linked, smiling at the camera the way they were told to smile.

The shoes are still mismatched.

The truth is still there, hidden in plain sight for more than a century, waiting for someone to notice what the Illinois Homefinding Association could not quite erase.

The canvas and the leather, the institutional and the borrowed, the two girls who were never twins, but who were bound together anyway by a system that saw children as problems to be solved and labor to be harvested.

And that system did not end in 1919.

It evolved.

It adapted.

It found new language and new justifications.

But the photographs remain scattered through archives and albums and estate sales, waiting to tell their stories to anyone willing to look closely enough to see the details that do not match.