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New Photo Gives Rare Glimpse Of Young Helen Keller

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Mar 5, 2008 9:49 pm US/Eastern

New Photo Gives Rare Glimpse Of Young Helen Keller

BOSTON (AP) ― Researchers have uncovered a rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan.

The discovery comes nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod and tucked inside a family album.

The photograph was shot in July 1888 in Brewster and shows an 8-year-old Helen sitting outside in a light-colored dress.

She's holding Sullivan's hand and cradling one of her beloved dolls.

Experts on Keller's life believe it could be the earliest photo of the two women together and the only one showing the blind and deaf child with a doll.

Helen Selsdon, an archivist at the American Foundation for the Blind, calls the find a "huge visual addition" to the history of Helen and Annie.

The photo was found in a collection that belonged to the family of Thaxter Spencer, an 87-year-old man in Waltham.

Advocates for the blind say they had never heard of it, but after they announced its discovery Wednesday, they learned it had been published in 1987 in a magazine on Cape Cod and a half-century earlier in The Boston Globe. It is unclear whether there's more than one copy of the photograph.

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