Part 2, Finding Lena

screen capture from Rebellion, Season 2, episode 1 (Netflix 2019) There are no photographs of Allena Finnegan, not a single one.  Not now, not ever.  I feel confident in this declaration.  I doubt there were childhood photographs of any of Miles and Maggie’s six children, and it is possible that there was never a single …

Part 1, Crossings: Miles Finnegan Makes His Mark

SS Germanic History begins in the present.  “What is history but that which has happened before I was born?” Roland Barthes asks in teasing out the appeal and the power of photography as artifact.  It is perhaps fitting then that this genealogical family story begins not with a passenger ship manifest marking an ocean crossing …