Research—even into things you think you know well—often yields something new. The surprise may come through locating additional facts that may require reconsidering previously known data in a new way. Or it may be that the researcher herself has changed and understands things in a new way.
The pieces comes together like a puzzle, but a puzzle that doesn’t initially have all the pieces in the box; some are shipped later, sometimes years or even decades later.
I first found these photos in 1998 in the Stamford Library’s history collection and realized that Stamford used to have flower parades. The other realization was that both vehicles must have been in the same parade, based on the size of the sapling near the building’s farthest-back window. But when? And who?
Then, in 2018, while researching editor Leo DeSilva for The Newspapermen, I stumbled across this image (Leo is the young man in white shirt and tie):
Zooming in on the poster on the left we learn that the fourth annual floral parade was scheduled for September 2, 1911. So we know that the first one was in 1908.
Then in April 2023, while browsing digital archives of newspapers at Harpersfield Historical, I found descriptions of all the vehicles in the parade, including lists of the people riding in them. The car above belonged to an A. G. Reeves and was driven by his son Raymond, while the woman driving the carriage pulled by the white horse was a Mrs. J. E. Safford. The article also pinpointed the date—August 31, 1909—and an alternate name for the event: Coaching Parade.
But there was also a mention in an earlier paper of a coaching parade in Stamford in 1900, raising the question: Why was the 1908 parade called the first? That’s a question for which an answer may or may not pop up some day and that’s a big part of the fun—almost every answer to a question contains another question.