Have you ever played the picturebook game “Where’s Waldon?” The game challenge is to find the friendly Waldo, dressed in a red-white horizontal striped shirt and blue pants, among a crowded landscape of various other individuals doing crazy activities. The game requires intense concentration as one must scan the book’s page without succumbing to the intentional distraction the picturebook artists placed on the page.
Living “Where’s Waldo” characters, setting a world’s record. William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
I suspect Josephine Cobb, the former chief of the Still Photo Section at the National Archives, may have been good at finding Waldo. In 1936, Archivist Cobb took on the task of enlarging photographs from a Civil War collection. In 1952, while studying a glass plate negative from November 19, 1863, she made a major discovery.
A crowd of citizens, soldiers, etc. with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Left: Negative glass plate. Right: Master Derivative of the 1980s Master Copy Negative. 529085. The photo is attributed to David Bachrach by William A. Frassanito.
Cobb understood the significance of the date–Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address occurred on that date. She scoured the large glass negative to see if Lincoln might be among the crowd. She estimated the photographer snapped the shot around noon, which fits the time window that Lincoln would be at the event.
With her “Where’s Waldo” skills, she noticed one face stuck out as potentially resembling the President. The face was not clear, but she could make a positive identification of Lincoln’s bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, who was standing near the face. Further, she noticed the crowd’s collective gaze appeared to fix on the face.
Josephine concluded: the face must be Abraham Lincoln. She had confirmed the only known photographic documentation of Lincoln at Gettysburg.
The white circle denotes Lincoln, whom Cobb identified in the larger glass negative. Abraham Lincoln (circled) at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863 (enlarged and cropped). (National Archives Identifier 529085).
In the image above, Lincoln has a white circle around his head. The man standing at the right edge of the image with a full beard, white sash, and top hate is likely Lincoln’s bodyguard Lamon whom Cobb first identified.
The National Archives webpage writes of Josephine’s inquisitive nature and attention to detail as the key factors in her success at the institution and her subsequent discovery of Lincoln’s image.