V.L. Cox of North Little Rock was poking around an antique mall in Little Rock this past winter when she stumbled upon a vintage leather baby book. She's run across a lot of personal items in her searches.
"I'm always looking for things that inspire my found object projects," says the artist, who earlier gained local attention for her rustic, Southern-themed works of art that incorporate vintage screen doors. She recently received wider attention for her "End Hate" exhibit of six doors that she's taken to Washington, D.C., and will soon take to Philadelphia.
The small, worn book captivated her.
"You could actually feel the love for that little child," she wrote in a post on her Facebook page.
"But that book was very different," she told Paper Trails. "In the '20s and '30s, people were struggling, but this family had money and you could tell that they were all about this little girl. In every photo, the little girl and her parents were smiling and beaming."
Cox paid $10 for the book, which the dealer thought came from Connecticut.
She showed the book to Sherrie Shepherd, production artist for the Arkansas Department of Health. Shepherd recognized the baby's name as someone who once was a doctor at the Health Department -- Rosalind Abernathy.
Abernathy also worked for decades at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Shepherd scanned the book's pages for the department's historical archives and began researching the book.
Dr. William Mason, also with the Health Department, helped track down Abernathy's son David in Morganton, N.C., a doctor who did his residency at UAMS in Little Rock.
After reading Cox's post of the album on her page, Cox's Facebook friend Mark Rowe filled in a lot of the blanks.
Born in Greenville, S.C., Rosalind was the only child of David Smith, a physician, and Susan, a research scientist. Living along the East Coast, her family moved to Durham, N.C., when her father became a professor at the then-new Duke University School of Medicine.
Later, as an adult, Abernathy and her husband, Bob, moved to Little Rock from Minneapolis in 1957. He worked in internal medicine with infectious diseases at UAMS, and she joined the pediatric clinic. In 1993, she worked at the Health Department as the pediatric consultant for the state tuberculosis program and held allergy clinics around the state.
After her parents retired, they joined her in Little Rock. Her father died in 1980, and her mother passed away in 1983.
Now in her 90s, Abernathy lives in a retirement home in North Carolina near her son David.
"She's still sharp as a tack," Cox says of the retired doctor. Weeks ago, the baby book was sent to Abernathy. Her new friends in Arkansas then received a photo of her holding it.
How the baby book became separated from Abernathy remains a mystery.
"It's really weird," Cox says. "We don't know how or when the book was lost."
Contact Linda S. Haymes at (501) 399-3636 or lhaymes@arkansasonline.com
SundayMonday on 06/07/2015