Investigation: Disneyland

Ever since my cousin told me that the location of the photo with her, her mother, and me in it was at Disneyland, I have been wondering where exactly at Disneyland.

I was talking with friends a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that one of them, who grew up in Burbank, always talks about Disneyland, which got me thinking about the photo.  And it suddenly occurred to me that Disneyland, being the big multinational conglomerate that it is, has to have a corporate archive.  And it does!

You can find the Walt Disney Archives site at https://d23.com/walt-disney-archives/.  According to the home page, it was "established in 1970 to collect, preserve and make available for research the historical materials relating to Walt and the company he founded."  And it even has a page called Ask the Walt Disney Archives!  So I did!

On May 27, I sent the photo of me with my mother that I posted for Mother's Day.  (The questions page did not allow me to send more than one image, or I would have included the photo with my cousin and aunt.)  I wrote that my cousin had identified the location as Disneyland and that I had estimated the year to be 1963.  I asked where at Disneyland the photo was taken.  And then I waited.

And waited.

And almost two weeks later, I still have not heard anything.  Not even one of those automatic responses:  "We have received your inquiry and will be happy to answer you, blah blah blah."

Well, foo.  I want to know where it was.

And today's brilliant light-bulb moment was that I should try searching for the image online myself.  (Yes, I should have thought of that earlier.  Sometimes I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I get there eventually.)

I ran the photo of my aunt, my cousin, and me through Tineye.  And the answer was "TinEye searched over 75.6 billion images but didn't find any matches for your search image."  So much for Tineye.  But I think it looks for the exact image, and I probably have the one and only copy of that photo (well, a scan of it).  On the other hand, it is posted on my blog, which is public and has been available for more than a month, so Tineye should have found it there.  But it didn't.  (I've had that happen before with Tineye.)

Then I tried searching for the photo using Google Lens.  It started off by wanting to focus on the lower left corner of the photo, which is just some of the flowers.  I didn't look at those results.  Instead, I dragged the search square higher and made it larger, so the search image was the upper left corner of the photo, including the yellow flower cart.

Bingo!

Suddenly I had several images that looked very similar to mine, and they are all identified as being at the Flower Market on Main Street in Disneyland.  Two of them are even from 1963, like mine.  And after seeing two photos where the "Flower Market" sign is not in bright sunlight and the words can be clearly read, I recognized that in my own photos.

One photo from 1963 (which was posted on Found some pictures from my grandparents 1963 Disneyland trip!)

Disneyland, People at Flower Market in 1963 (an original slide for sale at eBay)

The Cook family at Disneyland, 1959 (which has the same yellow flower cart as in mine, plus you can read FLOWER MARKET on the sign)

Flower Market - Disneyland 1950s-1970s (#29) (two yellow flower carts in this one, and again you can read FLOWER MARKET on the sign; no exact year, though)

So I answered my own question.  On the other hand, now I know that Disney has an archive.  And if Disney does get back to me, I'll post here what they say.