The photos seen here are from a scrapbook of “anonymous lesbian photographs” that span from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. Some shots are in the snow, others are from the beach; some capture time in the military, and many are just snapshots of everyday life.

That’s about all we really know – the rest is a mystery. We don’t know who took the photos or why; we don’t even know the identities of the people in them. The scrapbook was spotted in a Berkeley junk shop decades ago, and only exists today because the right person stumbled upon it and knew to send it to us.

While many collections come directly from the person who created them, some – like this scrapbook – come to us without any context. We faithfully preserve them regardless, because we know that our stories will be forgotten unless we ourselves remember them.

Thanks to the work of our archivists, people around the world can now flip through dozens of photos from this nearly forgotten book in our new digital collection. Through images like these we can start to understand the lives our ancestors lived, and even imagine ourselves sitting with them.

Keeping these stories alive is a costly endeavor. Creating archival quality scans and permanently preserving them costs us between $25-100 per item. If you are as moved as I am by the way our archives allow us to travel back in time and commune with our ancestors, I invite you to make a contribution to support our work.

If everyone receiving this newsletter donates just $25, we’ll be able to preserve countless more precious materials like these, so future generations can continue to learn their history. To help us keep our history alive – and double your impact with our donation match – visit glbthistory.org/donate.

Andrew Shaffer directs the society’s outreach, media and fundraising programs. Prior to joining the society, he led development efforts with multiple local nonprofits. He is trained as a historian, and his academic background includes graduate work at the University of San Francisco and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he helped to build that city’s first permanent LGBTQ archives.

Digitization of this collection was supported by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.

Portions of this article will be published by the San Francisco Bay Times, part of a collaboration in which we share selected treasures from our archival collections.