Blogger sheds light on grandmother’s Lewis Hine photo

For almost 15 years, retired social worker Joe Manning has been tracking down descendants of people photographed by Lewis Hine.

A former school teacher, Hine traveled the country documenting child labor in the early 1900s. He shot children working the berry fields outside Baltimore and manning the city’s factories; a life-size cutout of a boy holding a crate of cans is on display at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

Hine’s 5,000 photos of child laborers in America, many commissioned by the

National Child Labor Committee, live on at the Library of Congress website. But until now, the lives of his subjects after their picture was taken have been a mystery.

One of Hine’s subjects was Marie Kriss, a girl who moved with her Polishspeaking family from 757 S. Luzerne Ave. in Baltimore to Mississippi. In the 1911 photo, Kriss wears a dirty smock and a weary grimace. She shucked oysters and picked shrimp at the Biloxi Canning Company when not watching the baby, Hine’s caption notes, and made 25 cents some days.

In 2016, Manning located Kriss’ granddaughter, Sandra Beaugez of Mississippi, living not far from the former canning company. Beaugez had never seen Hine’s photo of her grandmother before Manning sent it to her.

“It breaks my heart,” she told Manning, according to an interview published on his blog. Kriss, who later would lose part of a finger from handling shrimp, never moved back to Baltimore before she died in 1993.

“But she never, ever complained. Never,” Beaugez told Manning.

Despite their hardscrabble youths, many children Hine photographed went on to live meaningful lives, Manning said.