The extraordinary exhibition, Seven Poor Children (or Syv fattige børn in Danish), began with one extraordinary photograph from the early 1950s. It shows Lisa, then a five-or-six-year-old girl, smiling as she tenderly holds the hand of a man in his late eighties, seated on a bench outside the workhouse (formerly known as the poorhouse) in Svendborg, Denmark. Some four years before Seven Poor Children opened, Lisa had brought this small photograph to the Danish Welfare Museum (Danmarks Forsorgsmuseum), which since 1974 has occupied the buildings of the former workhouse. Lisa explained that she was the eldest daughter of the workhouse’s warden, and that she knew only the man’s last name—which happened to be an uncommon one.
Using archival registers of former workhouse inmates, researchers at the museum were able to determine that the man in the photo was named Hermann (born ca. 1864), and that since the 1890s he had...