Summary: | This album is photographs taken by J.T. Geoghegan and postcards purchased by him during his time in Alaska. Jim went to Alaska in 1897 as a prospector in the Yukon gold rush. He learned early on that he could make more money supplying the gold camps than he could prospecting. He lost all of his property to a cabin fire in 1906, and the photographs he had left back home in Eastsound were destroyed when the home he and his brother Fred had built in 1889 for their mother and siblings burned to the ground in 1904. Jim returned to Eastsound in January 1914, having made his way back to Seattle just as the New Year was being rung in. No doubt he had several other albums of his earlier period in Alaska, but these, like the early views of Eastsound in the last decade of the nineteenth century, have not survived. The typed label on the cover of this album says 1911-1916. The ink above is indeed difficult to read, but should say 1913.
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