Hello, and welcome to our collection of original African American cultural artifacts,   lovingly rescued from estate sales and auctions around the country.   

We offer several artifactual genres.

Our antique image offerings range predominately from the 1800s to the 1940s. There are photos of African American families, church groups, children, couples. There is professional portraiture; there are many vernacular and “found” photographs. There are cabinet card photos, RPPCs, cartes de visite, and tintypes. African Americans, from myriad locales, rural and urban, are always the focal point.

This eclectic and fluid  photograph collection features all manner of African Americans -- worshiping, recreating, child-rearing, marrying, mourning—engaging in the full gamut of life experiences

The photos contain many hints with regard to times, places, genealogy, names, and the like. Many contain inscriptions or photographer’s marks. Others contain first and or last names.

Our ephemera-memorabilia offerings include artifacts such as programs, diaries, scrapbooks, sheet music, posters, advertisements, letters, diplomas, and legal documents.  These items lend dimension to the collection.

Our digital services, which include creation of personalized photographic-musical retrospectives and digital antique images for various uses, make access to and preservation of cultural artifacts possible for a diverse range of people.

Persons interested in African American history and genealogy, particularly persons with roots in the areas from which these artifacts have come, may, as they peruse this collection, see familiar places or faces.   

If you are interested in the origins of a particular item, do ask us what we know about the history surrounding it…we will delight in telling you!  

Our proudest achievement was the identification and location of the African American people featured in a large collection of “found” photographs, memorabilia and ephemera.  We joyfully returned the photos to their Princeton, New Jersey family and home.  Read the full story  as told by a member of the “lost” photo family.  Click Here: http://www.labonnevivante.com/

We are here to serve you and to help facilitate, through our collection, enhanced understanding and broadened perspectives of the African American Diaspora.

This is an outstanding, ever changing, and unusual collection offering many rare items, so look and enjoy!