Ancestry Magazine

Lewis Hine dedicated his life to stopping child labor from behind a camera. Today, Joe Manning is dedicating his retirement to finding the children in front of Hine’s lens.

To the best of his knowledge, Joe Manning has no blood ties to anyone featured in the 50,000 child labor photos taken by Lewis Hine a century ago. But that doesn’t keep them from feeling like family.
“In most of my waking hours, I find myself thinking about these children,” says Joe, who has taken on the self-appointed task of finding the modern-day families of the subjects of Hine’s work. That says a lot about the power of the photos—yesterday and today.
Hine’s story is the stuff legends are made of. Shortly after the start of the 20th century, Hine quit his teaching job to work for the National Child Labor Committee. He was instructed to capture photos of working children. His personal goal was to ensure no child would be robbed of a chance to learn, to grow, and to be a kid.
Over the course of four years, Hine tricked his way into factories, canneries, and farms—anywhere children were exploited for low-paid labor. The photos, which capture children crawling through mine tunnels, picking cotton, and threading looms, were used to convince lawmakers to pass and enforce laws banning child labor.
Hine’s work gained little notoriety at the time. Even Joe, a retired social worker with a passion for history, admits that until an author friend asked him to find a living descendant of one of Hine’s subjects, he knew virtually nothing about the photos. But now that he does, he’s hooked, spending most of his time poring over old photos and online censuses and family trees, searching for families who rarely know this part of their ancestor’s past.
“You can never overestimate their reaction. It’s a very emotional thing to find your own family,” says Joe, recalling the time he connected with a man who thought he was just getting a picture of his aunt. Turned out that an unidentified girl in the photo was his own mother—and the man had never seen a picture of her as a little girl.
Joe himself, who started searching for his own roots just a handful of years ago, is finding his own “family” growing with each successful reunion. “I have quite a few pictures of the kids as adults and quite a few pictures of their sons and daughters. You get very attached to these children,” he says.
No doubt Hine would agree.