Grand Rapids to post historic jail mugshots on Instagram

Plan is part of an effort by city’s archives to help residents find photos of family members

By Melissa Frick
The Grand Rapids Press

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Looking to trace the roots of your family history? If your early 20th century relatives spent some time in the Grand Rapids jail, you might be in luck.

The Grand Rapids Archives is moving thousands of the city’s historical jail photos ranging from 1928-1939 into an online database, and will next month begin posting the photos on Instagram.

The mugshots, which will be posted to Instagram once a day beginning Sept. 2, are part of an effort by the city’s archives to help residents find photos of their long-lost family members.

“These are probably the only photographs of these individuals in existence,” said Tony Wright, the city’s archives officer. “So, for people looking for family members and looking to trace their family history, these photos will be very valuable.”

Between the city and the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the archives contain at least 5,000 historic jail photos, Wright said.

The historic photos were contained in Grand Rapids jail books, discovered decades ago in a dumpster, that include a wealth of information about each inmate.

Listed in the old, yellowed pages are the inmates’ names, addresses, ages, professions and reasons for being arrested.

“This is a great way to find photos and information of your family,” Wright said. “But it’s also just really interesting. True crime is a big magnet for people.”

Along with helping residents trace their lineage, the photos also provide historical context for those conducting research about the culture of Grand Rapids in the early 20th century, The Grand Rapids Press reported.

“You get to see what kind of crimes were being committed in Grand Rapids during the early 1900s,” Wright said. “You can see the violations of liquor laws when during the times of prohibition, and the thefts happening during the Great Depression.”

Matthew Ellis, assistant archivist with the city, said his favorite crime he’s come across was an inmate who was arrested for “malicious destruction of garden.”

“Gardening was really important for many families at the time, that’s how they put food on the table, so it was considered a pretty serious crime,” Ellis said.

The book lists inmates’ addresses, allowing people to see what types of crimes were being committed in different areas of Grand Rapids.

“For example, we found a lot of women who were arrested for prostitution that lived in the same building,” Ellis said.

The photos also provide a glimpse into important times in American history, from the Great Depression to the Great Migration, which was the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the urban Northeast and Midwest.

“You can visually see those changes to American cities as far as population is concerned, like during the Great Migration when many African Americans were leaving the South and coming up towards the city,” Wright said.

Many of the earlier photos list Bertillon measurements for each inmate, which was an antiquated system used to measure the physical features of people for identification before fingerprint identification was used. The measurements included the distance between someone’s eyes, their ear lengths and the width of their face.

However, Wright said the system was racist because it would use certain terms to single out African American inmates — for example, it would list the eye color of African Americans as “maroon” instead of brown, he said.

From transcribing hard-to-read cursive text, to scanning each of the hundreds of photos, the process for the online conversion has been long and tedious, Wright said.

“It’s like figuring out a puzzle,” he said. “But it’s fun.”

Wright said he sees this being the future of the city’s archives system. The city eventually plans to move more historic documents into online databases, such as old Grand Rapids City Commission minutes dating back to the 1800s.


“We want people to easily access this information,” Wright said.


 

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