Family albums and scrapbooks are treasure chests filled with memories — good and bad. Old photographs, their edges curled with age and humidity, inspire curiosity, but unfortunately the questions as to the identities of the people in the pictures and their locations are often left unanswered due to the carelessness of the compiler who neglected to annotate them. Perhaps they thought they could do it later or just assumed they would always remember the information. Memories are often flawed — especially with age — and the younger generations, self-absorbed with their own lives, are not interested in the anecdotes of the past.
This is the 600th article of this series and I thought it would be fitting to examine one of my favorite scrapbooks — one kept by Kate Lay in the mid-1890s.
The Lay family had a long history in Korea. Kate’s older brother, William George Lay, arrived in Korea in 1886 to serve with the Korean Imperial Customs Service in Fusan (modern Busan) as an assistant. We don’t know much about his two-year 커뮤니티 stay in that port as he is rarely mentioned — mainly in regional directories. His younger brother, Arthur G. Hyde, was stationed at the British Legation in Tokyo and, judging from Kate’s scrapbook, she was there with him from 1887 until about 1902. I assume he wrote letters to them, but unfortunately I have not been able to find any of them.