At first glance, the 1919 studio portrait looked unremarkable. Two girls stood side by side in a well-lit Chicago photography studio, arms linked, smiling faintly at the camera. They wore matching white dresses with lace collars and puffed sleeves. Their hair was curled and pinned in the same style. The painted backdrop showed an idealized garden scene, a common choice in early 20th-century portraiture. Everything about the image suggested care, order, and respectability.
Everything except the shoes.
Margaret Holloway noticed them immediately. She had worked at the Chicago Historical Society for 17 years and had cataloged thousands of family portraits from the city’s commercial studios. She knew the visual language of these photographs intimately. This image had arrived in a donation box from a South Side estate sale, mixed among ledgers, correspondence, and promotional materials from a long-defunct child welfare organization called the Illinois Home Finding Association.
The girls appeared to be eight or nine years old. Their dresses were identical, carefully pressed, and clearly new. Under magnification, however, their footwear told two different stories. The girl on the left wore polished leather button-up boots, recently purchased and well made. The girl on the right wore rough canvas shoes, hand-stitched with uneven seams. The toe box sagged slightly. The soles were layered fabric rather than leather. These were institutional shoes, the kind produced cheaply in workrooms when budgets were limited.
Margaret turned the photograph over. On the back, written in faded ink, was a caption: “The Moyer twins placed together. June 1919, success story for annual report.” The phrasing unsettled her. If these girls were twins from the same family, why would one be wearing store-bought boots and the other standard-issue institutional footwear?
She set the photograph down carefully. In her experience, photographs like this were rarely neutral. She had spent nearly two decades examining images that families preferred to forget or institutions had deliberately reshaped. She had learned to read photographs the way investigators read scenes: every object, every posture, every imbalance mattered.
She removed the print from its cardboard mount and scanned it at high resolution. The mount itself bore printed text from the Illinois Home Finding Association: “Building Christian families through child placement.” The studio stamp identified the photographer as Lindholm & Sons, a commercial outfit that operated on South State Street between 1915 and 1923, known for family portraits and institutional commissions.
Margaret studied the girls’ faces again. Both were smiling, but not in the same way. The girl with the leather boots met the camera with practiced ease. The girl in canvas shoes angled her gaze slightly away. Her smile was tighter. Her posture was rigid. Margaret recognized the expression from other photographs of children in orphanages and industrial schools. It was the look of someone instructed to smile without understanding why.
She pulled her research notes on the Illinois Home Finding Association. The organization had been founded in 1907 by Protestant reformers who believed poor and orphaned children should be removed from large institutions and placed in private homes, preferably rural ones, where they could learn discipline, labor, and Christian values. The agency operated until 1927, when it dissolved quietly.
This photograph had been part of its promotional materials.
Margaret felt the familiar ethical weight settle in. She could catalog the image as labeled and move on, or she could follow the questions forming beneath the surface. If these girls were not truly twins, then what were they? And why would a child welfare agency present them as such?
She began with basic verification. City directories confirmed Lindholm & Sons operated at 438 South State Street in 1919. Cross-referencing addresses showed the Illinois Home Finding Association’s office on West Adams Street, near other reform organizations like Hull House. These agencies shared donors, philosophies, and strategies for managing urban poverty.
Margaret contacted a colleague, Dr. Robert Chen, a historian specializing in Progressive Era social welfare. After reviewing the image, he explained that the Illinois Home Finding Association functioned as part of the broader orphan placement movement. Officially, the placements were called foster care or adoption. In practice, children were placed with families in exchange for labor. Girls were expected to cook, clean, and do laundry. Boys were sent to farms or shops. Oversight was minimal once a placement occurred.
Margaret asked about twins. Robert paused. He had seen promotional materials emphasizing sibling placements, which were marketed as emotionally beneficial while also doubling household labor. But he had never encountered documented cases of agencies fabricating sibling relationships outright. If that was happening here, it mattered.
Margaret returned to the records. She searched Cook County birth records for Moyer twins born around 1910 or 1911. None fit. Two sets had died in infancy. The only surviving twins were boys. She expanded her search to institutional records. Orphan asylums, soldiers’ children’s homes, Protestant institutions all came up empty.
Then she found a single entry in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Home ledger. In May 1919, a nine-year-old girl named Lena Moyer had been transferred to the Illinois Home Finding Association after her mother, Alice Moyer, was sentenced to the women’s reformatory in Joliet for theft. There was no mention of siblings.
Census records confirmed it. In 1910, Lena lived alone with her mother in a West Side tenement. Alice worked in a garment factory. No father. No other children. In 1920, Alice appeared in the state reformatory census. Lena disappeared from public records.
Lena Moyer was not a twin.
The question then became: who was the other girl?
Margaret contacted the Newberry Library and learned that it held an unprocessed collection from the Illinois Home Finding Association, donated decades earlier by the daughter of a former board member. Over several days, she sifted through brittle correspondence, financial ledgers, and boxes of photographs.
She found standardized contracts titled “Agreement for the Temporary Care and Christian Training of a Child.” They specified that receiving families would provide food, shelter, and schooling in exchange for the child’s labor in domestic or agricultural work. Contracts ran for one to three years. Children received no wages. At the end of the term, families could adopt the child or return them.
In correspondence from March 1919, the agency’s director, Reverend Harold Trimble, outlined plans to increase donations through a new annual report featuring photographs of successful placements. He wrote that donors responded most favorably to images of siblings placed together. A follow-up letter from the bookkeeper in May noted that the agency had few sibling groups available and suggested focusing on individual girls, who were in high demand.
Despite that, a photograph of “twins” appeared in June.
Margaret found a second copy of the image with a different caption: “Lena M. and Dorothy K. successful double placement demonstration for donors. June 1919.” The second girl was Dorothy Kowalski, age eight. Records showed she had been transferred to the agency in April 1919 after her father died in an industrial accident and her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis. She had no siblings.
The photograph was staged. Two unrelated girls were dressed alike and posed as twins to fabricate a narrative of successful sibling placement.
Margaret returned to Dr. Chen with the evidence. He studied the shoes again and explained their significance. Canvas shoes were standard issue in detention homes and orphanages. Children often made them themselves as part of institutional labor. Leather boots were expensive. Agencies kept wardrobes of dresses for photographs but rarely invested in matching shoes.
The mismatch suggested timing. Dorothy, newly taken into custody, still had decent footwear. Lena, already institutionalized, wore what the system had given her. The photograph preserved that difference by accident.
A “double placement” meant placing two children with one family. It was sold as charity but functioned as efficiency: two laborers, one household. If the children were not siblings, the family was deceived. More importantly, the children were coerced into a false identity that erased their real histories.
Margaret thought about Lena’s mother in prison and Dorothy’s mother in a hospital bed. Both girls had been removed not for abuse, but for poverty and crisis, then repackaged as a success story.
Margaret documented everything and proposed an exhibition contextualizing the photograph within the broader history of child welfare exploitation. Her supervisor expressed concern about donor sensitivities, particularly given that Reverend Trimble’s descendants remained connected to the institution. Margaret insisted that avoiding the truth perpetuated the same sanitized narrative the agency had created.
She was asked to gather more evidence.
Over the next month, Margaret uncovered similar photographs from other agencies, contracts mandating long work hours for children as young as six, and correspondence from families demanding children be returned when they became ill or unproductive. She also found resistance. Letters from Reverend James Mitchell, a Black pastor, documented organized efforts to stop agencies from removing children from poor Black families. His letters accused the system of theft, not charity.
Margaret brought this expanded research to the board. The debate was tense. Some members worried about overreach. Others argued the evidence was sufficient. Ultimately, the exhibition was approved, with careful review.
The exhibition opened in January 2023 under the title Hidden Labor: Children and the Business of Reform in Progressive Era Chicago. The photograph of Lena Moyer and Dorothy Kowalski was displayed prominently, with a magnified section highlighting their mismatched shoes. Visitors leaned in close. Many stayed longer than expected.
Descendants of placed children attended. Social workers and historians came to study the documentation. Some visitors recognized stories their families had told quietly for decades. One woman described her grandmother being photographed, dressed in borrowed clothes, told to smile for strangers. She said her grandmother always described those images as unreal, as if she herself had been erased.
Not everyone welcomed the exhibition. Descendants of Reverend Trimble objected and threatened to withdraw financial support. The institution stood by the research. Media coverage followed, prompting other archives to re-examine similar images in their collections.
Margaret continued her work. She eventually traced Lena Moyer’s life. Lena had worked for a rural Illinois family until 1924, then in hotel laundries. She died in 1967 in a county nursing home. Her occupation was listed as domestic worker. Dorothy Kowalski died in 1953 after a lifetime of housework. Neither married. Neither had children.
Margaret published her findings, noting that for decades, viewers saw twins, charity, and success. Only the shoes preserved the truth. Canvas and leather. Institutional and borrowed. Two girls bound together by a system that valued children as labor rather than people.
The photograph remains on display. Visitors still notice the shoes. The image no longer speaks of twins. It speaks of what institutions could not fully control, and what careful attention can still reveal.
