By Sebastián Encina, Collections Manager
A very common occurrence in archives is coming across mysteries that have no answers. It is frustrating for those of us working with these materials to not have any idea what we have stumbled across. Or who these people are. Or what this photograph is depicting. More frustrating is knowing that for some of these matters, there will never be an answer.
Even with materials very familiar to us, such mysteries pop up. Though we have spent many years working with the maps, journals, and photographs from the Karanis excavations, there are still some items that leave us puzzled. One such example is a series of drawings of artifacts excavated at Karanis. The drawings are in color in order to capture the full nature of the artifacts, a necessity in the days before color photography.
The drawings themselves are not the mysteries. We know what artifacts are depicted; most are here at the Kelsey Museum. Instead, the mystery is who drew them. They are signed by “Joslin” and dated 1929, but no first name, no affiliation, no other identifying information is given. The 1929 Karanis excavation team included several architects and artists, but nothing else in our archives was associated with “Joslin.”
In 2015, the Kelsey Museum received an email from Nancy Joslin Kaleel saying her grandfather was an architecture student at U-M who went to Karanis with the U-M team in 1929. She and her son Calvin were visiting Ann Arbor and were interested in seeing anything relating to Joslin at the Kelsey Museum. We invited Nancy and Calvin to view these files and during their visit, Nancy revealed that Joslin was actually Frederick Burr Joslin, an architect who designed homes in Detroit. Mystery solved.
Nancy recently returned to the Kelsey, bringing more family members who were interested in seeing F. B. Joslin’s work and learning about the Kelsey and the excavations at Karanis. For this month’s “From the Archives,” we present a few of Joslin’s drawings and a photo of his family members each holding a drawing.
It was an absolute pleasure hosting the family at the Kelsey Museum and spending an afternoon with them. They were a delight to have, and we learned so much more about Joslin than we previously knew. Nancy and Judith, who are sisters, say they have many of their grandfather’s belongings, so perhaps we will continue to learn about Joslin’s time at Karanis. What they find may wind up being a future “From the Archives” blog post.
