This 1919 studio portrait of two twins looks cute until you notice the shoes. At first glance, it’s ordinary: two girls in matching white dresses, arms linked, smiling in a well-lit Chicago studio. But one detail troubled curator Margaret Holloway—the shoes didn’t match. After 17 years at the Chicago Historical Society, cataloging thousands of early 20th-century portraits, she knew what belonged and what didn’t. The image arrived from a south-side estate sale, mixed with ledgers, correspondence, and materials from a defunct child welfare agency, the Illinois Home Finding Association.

The girls appeared eight or nine, their hair curled and pinned identically, dresses matching to lace collar and puffed sleeves. They stood before a painted garden backdrop, popular in studio portraiture of the era. Everything suggested prosperity and care—except the shoes. Under magnification, Margaret saw the left girl’s polished leather button-up boots, clearly new. The right girl wore rough, hand-stitched canvas shoes with uneven seams, sagging toe box, and fabric-layered sole—workroom, institutional issue.

On the back, faded ink read: “The Moyer twins placed together. June 1919, success story for annual report.” If they were twins from the same family, why would one have store-bought boots and the other handmade institutional shoes? Margaret set the photo down; this wasn’t just a charming relic. Something was wrong. She’d spent years reading photographs like forensic scenes—objects, expressions, and arrangement often contradicted captions.

She scanned the print at high resolution and removed it from its cardboard mount. The mount bore Illinois Home Finding Association branding—decorative borders and the motto, “Building Christian families through child placement.” The studio stamp identified Lindholm & Sons, a commercial outfit on South State Street, active 1915–1923. Margaret re-examined the faces: both smiling, but with different eyes. The girl in good boots met the camera with practiced ease; the girl in canvas shoes glanced slightly aside, smile tighter, posture rigid—the told-to-smile look of institutional children.

She pulled notes on the Illinois Home Finding Association, founded in 1907 by Protestant leaders and reformers advocating removal from large orphanages to rural homes for “honest labor” and Christian values. Operating two decades, it dissolved quietly in 1927. This photograph had served promotional purposes. Margaret faced an ethical choice: file neutrally or follow the questions. If not twins, what were they—and why stage a twin portrait?

Starting with the obvious, she located Lindholm & Sons at 438 South State Street in 1919, specializing in family and institutional work. Tribune ads promised dignified portraiture for families, schools, and charities. The agency’s office sat on West Adams Street near Hull House, embedded in the reform network that shared donors and strategies for managing the city’s poor. Proximity mattered; this was a coordinated system. Margaret contacted Dr. Robert Chen at Northwestern, a historian of Progressive Era welfare.

Robert recognized the agency immediately. He explained it as part of the Orphan Train network but focused on local placements across Illinois. Heavy advertising in church bulletins and rural papers pitched families “domestic help” in exchange for guidance to needy children. Officially adoption or foster care; functionally labor placement. Girls worked housework and laundry; boys performed farm labor and apprenticeships. Oversight was minimal once placed; outcomes varied.

Margaret asked about staged siblings. Robert had seen promotional materials emphasizing sibling groups—comfort for children, double labor for families at modest added cost. He hadn’t documented fabricated sibling relationships; if this was such an instance, it was significant. Margaret searched Cook County records for Moyer twins born around 1910–1911. Three sets appeared; none matched—two died in infancy, one set were boys. She widened the search to orphanages and institutional ledgers.

The Newberry Library’s digitized Chicago Orphan Asylum intake showed no Moyer twins. Nor did the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s School or the Protestant Orphan Asylum. In the Cook County Juvenile Detention Home records, she found Lena Moyer, nine, transferred to the Illinois Home Finding Association in May 1919 after her mother was sentenced to Joliet for theft. No twin or siblings listed. Census records showed Lena as a one-year-old with her mother, Alice, in 1910; no father, no other children.

By 1920, Alice appeared in the women’s reformatory; Lena vanished from public records. Lena existed—alone—placed June 1919. Who was the other girl? The Newberry archivist, Patricia Quan, produced unprocessed boxes donated in the 1970s by a board member’s daughter. Margaret found standardized contracts titled “Agreement for the temporary care and Christian training of a child,” trading food, shelter, and schooling for domestic or agricultural labor, one to three years, renewable at family and agency discretion. No wages; adoption optional at term’s end.

Correspondence from Reverend Harold Trimble, the agency director, outlined a March 1919 plan to increase donations via an annual report with photographs of successful placements. “Donors respond to images of children thriving, particularly siblings placed together,” he wrote. A May 1919 bookkeeper letter noted only three sibling groups available, two being boys less desirable for domestic labor placements; recommended focusing on individual girls. Yet in June 1919, the agency produced a “twins” photograph.

Margaret found a second print with a different caption: “Lena M. and Dorothy K. successful double placement demonstration for donors. June 1919.” She traced Dorothy Kowalski, age eight, transferred in April 1919 after her father’s industrial death and her mother’s hospitalization for tuberculosis. No siblings. Lena and Dorothy were unrelated girls, dressed identically and posed together to simulate a sibling placement. The image was staged to appeal to donors and families.

The shoes became the tell. Robert, examining the prints, noted mismatched footwear as either necessity or calculated oversight. Dresses were new, likely purchased for the shoot; shoes were expensive and harder to match. Lena, institutionalized longer, wore standard canvas; Dorothy wore boots she arrived with or that were borrowed. Canvas shoes stitched from scrap were common in state orphanages—cheap, quick to wear, endlessly replaced in workrooms. Girls sewed shoes and mended clothing; boys handled carpentry and gardens.

Margaret pictured the girls—arms linked, coached to smile—Lena in canvas, Dorothy in borrowed leather. Both were props in a campaign to extract donor money and child labor. A “double placement” meant one family taking two children—efficient case clearance, double workers, better labor return on “investment.” Presented as charity, it was an economic arrangement. When children posed as twins, their identities were coerced; histories erased for agency benefit.

She thought about Lena’s mother in Joliet, perhaps unaware of her daughter’s whereabouts, and Dorothy’s mother in a hospital, too ill to advocate. Removal stemmed from poverty and circumstance, then repackaged as success. Outcomes varied widely: some genuine adoptions, many cases of children worked, denied schooling, and returned when no longer useful. Survivors’ oral histories describe drifting between families, working without wages, and learning they were there to labor, not belong.

Margaret wrote her findings and proposed an exhibition on child welfare corruption in Progressive Era Chicago. Her supervisor, Gerald Pritchard, praised the research but worried about donor controversy—Trimble’s descendants remained patrons. He urged a systemic framing, not personal accusations. Margaret argued systems are built and maintained by individuals; naming Rev. Trimble was essential. Gerald asked for broader evidence to show widespread practice.

Over a month, Margaret found similar photographs across agencies—children posed with farm tools or well-dressed families, captions emphasizing transformation into “productive” lives. Contracts mandated children as young as six to work at least eight hours daily in domestic service. Families demanded returns when children became ill or refused to work. She also found resistance: a south-side Black Baptist church’s letters from Reverend James Mitchell in the early 1920s.

Mitchell challenged the agencies, arguing disproportionate targeting of Black and immigrant children and exploitative “Christian homes.” His letters to officials and the governor mostly went unanswered. One 1922 letter listed removed children from his congregation: “These children are not orphans. They have families who love them. Because we are poor and Black, courts deem us unfit. The agencies say they save them. We say they steal them.” Margaret added these to her file.

A DePaul historian explained Black mutual aid networks created foster alternatives and legal defense funds, though under-resourced against white-led agencies. Margaret presented to the board’s exhibitions committee, showing the shoes, fabricated siblings, contracts, correspondence, and Mitchell’s letters. A retired attorney cautioned against implying all families were abusive. Margaret clarified: the system was exploitative by design, commodifying children as labor.

A philanthropist asked about the girls’ outcomes; records were fragmentary. Lena disappeared after 1919; Dorothy appeared in 1930 as a domestic servant in Evanston. Institutional records obscured as much as they revealed. The board urged careful, factual framing for public audiences. Margaret insisted truth was necessary. They approved the exhibition, contingent on outreach to contemporary child welfare groups and review by a historian for accuracy.

Margaret built “Hidden Labor: Children and the Business of Reform in Progressive Era Chicago,” opening January 1923. Centerpiece: Lena and Dorothy’s portrait with a magnified section of mismatched shoes. Descendants, scholars, and social workers attended; journalists covered it. Visitors leaned in, studying shoes and reading captions. A woman in her sixties, Karen Lindström, said her grandmother had been dressed in borrowed clothes and told to smile for agency photos—“They turned her into a prop.”

Karen contributed to the oral history archive. Trimble’s descendants pressured the museum to modify or remove the exhibit, threatening funding. The board stood behind documented evidence and the duty to present uncomfortable truths. A local newspaper ran “The Children Chicago Forgot,” prompting archives nationwide to re-examine collections for staged images. Researchers emailed Margaret with comparable photographs—children posed to sell stories that masked exploitation.

She compiled a national database of such images. Tracing Lena’s life, she found a placement in rural Illinois (1919–1924), later hotel laundry work in Indiana, a brief marriage, and death in 1967 in a county nursing home—no children, no survivors, occupation listed as domestic worker. Dorothy’s trail ended with a 1953 death record in Milwaukee; she worked as a housekeeper, never married, with a niece as informant suggesting some family ties.

In a public history journal, Margaret wrote: Lena and Dorothy were photographed in 1919 to fabricate a sibling success. In reality, they were unrelated girls whose childhoods were interrupted by poverty, crisis, and a system that valued them as labor. Their mismatched shoes, barely visible, are the surviving evidence of separate identities. For decades, viewers saw twins, saw success, saw charity—until close reading revealed the truth.

The photograph remains on display. School groups use it to discuss evidence and institutional narratives. Margaret leads tours on reading images against the grain and questioning comfortable stories about uncomfortable histories. The image itself asks no questions: two girls in white dresses, arms linked, smiling as instructed. The shoes remain mismatched. The truth endures—hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone to notice.

Canvas and leather. Institutional and borrowed. Two girls who were never twins, bound by a system that framed children as problems to solve and labor to harvest. That system did not end in 1919—it evolved, adapted its language and justifications. The photographs remain, scattered across archives and albums and estate sales, waiting to tell their stories to anyone who looks closely enough to see the details that do not match.