Before COVID-19 changed life and work as we know it, lots of new content was added to Digital Commonwealth including the voluminous photo archive of Dennis Brearley which chronicles the life of the City of Boston from the 1920s to 1970s.  From parades to protests, it’s all there providing the rich historical context that photographs can.

Boston Public Library

• Early, Rare, and Exceptional Items from Special Collections, Rare Books (2 items)*
• Incunabula (6 items)*
• Medieval and Early Renaissance Manuscripts (1 item)*
• Press Photography from the Brearley Collection (17,586 items)*
• Shakespeare (6 items)*

                                            Holyoke Public Library 

C.R. Wilhelm Collection (203 items)

Originally scheduled to take place Sunday, April 4, a program on the Remarkable Photography of Leon Abdalian at the Jamaica Plain Branch Library has been postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis.  While that talk will be re-scheduled at a future time, in the meantime we encourage you to visit Leon’s large body of work accessible via Digital Commonwealth.Born Leon Hampartzoum Abdalian in Armenia, Ottoman Empire in 1884, he came to the US as a 12 year old in 1896.

The Abdalian family settled in Jamaica Plain, a subject of thousands of his later photographs.  A train conductor by day with the Boston Elevated Railway, Leon was largely self-taught and took photographs as a hobby which expanded into a busy sideline. His photos were published in The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Traveler  and as a career highlight, in the March 1920 issue of  National Geographic magazine.

Besides his beloved hometown of JP, West Roxbury, Milton, Dedham, Lexington, Salem and Gloucester are featured subjects as our family groups in their living rooms, at picnics, weddings, and the Arnold Arboretum. The photos are clean and classically composed, and really fun to browse, especially when compared with the JP of today.

After his death in 1967, his daughter Lilian donated several hundred negatives to the Boston Public Library and his entire body of work was bequeathed to BPL in 2003, a gift of the Arnold P. and Lillian A.Clough estate.