About fifteen years earlier and less than a quarter mile away from where Mary Schmidt and John Rodgers posed, John Frank Keith photographed these two friends identified as Harriet Goodchild and Florence Schlager. Florence worked in a factory, while Harriet labored in a paper mill. Harriet’s widowed mother supported her family as a dishwasher in an oyster establishment. We can speculate that perhaps Keith knew her since he worked as a bookkeeper in an unidentified oyster business. Both these young women married shortly after this photograph was taken. Harriet moved across Peirce Street from her mother and kept house for her chauffeur husband and growing young family. Another photograph in the Keith collection shows three young siblings posed on a stoop, one of whom after her marriage moved around the corner and became one of Harriet’s neighbors on the same block of Peirce Street. If more identifying information was available on Keith’s photographs, an even larger web of connections within this South Philadelphia neighborhood along the Delaware River would undoubtedly emerge.

While ancestory.com has unlocked the stories of some of the people Keith photographed, Keith’s connection to this neighborhood is still not clear. He grew up in a home on North Sixth Street, and even as a peripatetic boarder later in life, never lived in South Philadelphia. We can speculate that perhaps when Keith worked in the oyster business along the Delaware near Walnut Street he took walks down to South Philadelphia along the river armed with his camera and continued to visit this neighborhood even when his work location changed. Keith may have indeed approached strangers as he walked along the streets in front of their homes, but a close examination of the collection indicates that a number of the photographs, such as the two reproduced below, were more likely taken in the courtyards behind the row houses, not on the front stoops and sidewalks.