The process of going through our stores of historical images and documents is sure to result in lovely little surprises like this one.

National Archives

Michael Horsley was in the middle of a long day scanning glass plate negatives at the National Archives' Digital Imaging Lab in College Park, Maryland, when a single caption leapt out from among the hundreds whizzing across his monitor: "Laying the Keel of U.S.S Battleship No. 39 Arrival of Asst. Scty [sic] F.D. Roosevelt, & Others." In that instant, Horsley's brain fired that there was something there, and he asked his colleague to go back through the images that had passed by to find it again.

Horsley got a closer look at the image. A man in the foreground on scaffolding, watching a group of dignitaries pass below. "Striding confidently in the front of the group," Horsley writes on the Archives' blog, NARAtions, "was a smiling figure wearing a stylish derby hat with his head cocked staring straight at the camera." Could it be the future president? Horsley knew that at some point Roosevelt had contracted polio and used a wheelchair thereafter, but he wasn't sure when that had occurred. Could this photo show Roosevelt walking?

Horsley zoomed in. The man certainly resembled Roosevelt.