Treasure from an Archivist’s Family Attic

As an archivist, you see a lot of interesting photos. This one shows an altar built by a patient in a tubercular hospital during the early 1940’s. It was featured in the pages of The Tablet, the Brooklyn Diocese’s official newspaper. A few years later, I came across this same image in a family photo album that was missing for many years. Well, this very same picture was in the album, and it turns out that the altar was built by my grandfather, Thomas McNamara (1908-1966), while he was a patient there.