Permanent.org is a personal legacy archive platform created to enable people to preserve family history, tell their stories, and most importantly, ensure that it is safely passed on and available to others for years to come.

They recently launched a project they called the Legacy Lab, which encouraged participants to do a start-to-finish archive on a particular family member. I’m still in the process of doing mine, which is on my maternal grandfather Boris Lenoff, who was a portrait photographer who had his studio on the Coney Island boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

With a little research, I found this photo of an African-American man in full uniform posing in my grandfather’s studio. I found it in the Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection on the Emory University website. I cannot tell which branch of the service it was from, but I estimate the photo was taken in the late 1910s or early 1920s.

There is an amazing rush I get when I actually find a historical document or photo in the course on my research, I highly encourage you to take that journey yourself.