He inherited the plastic tub full of century-old glass negatives a few months ago.
A gift from a retired historian to a former intern.
Matt Hansen pulled 33 glass plates — most of them 8-by-10s — from their worn manila envelopes, and took a visual tour of Lincoln’s early history.
People: A pair of uniformed soldiers, hands clasped behind their backs. A trio of women in formal dresses, widows perhaps, posing in a parlor with a piano in the background.
Places: The Capitol, NU Coliseum and Cornhusker Hotel, all under construction. A much smaller Memorial Stadium.
And things: Close-ups of radio equipment, and a nighttime Ku Klux Klan cross-burning on North 27th Street.
By day, Hansen is the state Capitol’s preservation architect. During his off hours, though, his hobby is Lincoln history.
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He wrote the application that landed Robber’s Cave on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. The year before that, he led an archeological excavation down the street from the Capitol, which uncovered thousands of artifacts — bottles and crocks, sleigh bells and a crucifix — that helped tell more of the story of early Lincoln.
And now he had a plastic tub full of unanswered questions.
Where did these negatives come from? Who took the photos? Why?
“It was something interesting to pursue and to try to solve the mystery,†he said. “I started digging into who the photographer was.â€
With a little luck and hours of research — searching newspaper archives and genealogy sites — he was able to solve that.
But his search would also take an unexpected detour — to the crematorium at Roper and Sons Funeral Home.
And he was able to unravel a family mystery he hadn’t known existed.
eBay buy solves first mystery
Ed Zimmer had the mystery negatives before Hansen, his former intern.
Maybe 15 years ago, maybe a little longer than that, collector Jim Seacrest had handed them over to the city’s preservationist planner.
At the time, Zimmer was researching a cache of glass negatives taken by John Johnson, a photographer who chronicled Lincoln’s African American community in the early 20th century.
Zimmer took a look and determined they weren’t Johnson’s work. But Seacrest insisted he keep them anyway.
“He said, ‘Take them with you. If you ever print them, send me prints, but I don’t want the negatives.’â€
Zimmer put them in storage, staying busy with other projects. He dug them out after he retired last year.
Hansen wasn’t surprised when Zimmer presented him with a plastic tub after they had lunch in late September.
“If you know Ed, he’s always got 3 million irons in the fire,†Hansen said. “So I understand why they were put on the back-burner.â€
And Zimmer knew he was giving them to the appropriate person. “I felt very much that I had passed it on to the right hands.â€
Hansen lugged the tote to his office, started examining the negatives — and a couple of the images looked familiar.
Every day, he checks eBay and other websites for Capitol memorabilia, mostly photos and prints, though he once found a cigar box emblazoned with an image of the Capitol.
His department, the Capitol Commission, often buys the items for its archives. And earlier this year, Hansen had ordered a couple of old prints of the Capitol under construction.
He pulled them out and compared them to his new negatives. They were a match.
He flipped the eBay-bought prints over and found a name and an address: Lew Cook, 2817 S. 12th St.
At first, he thought Cook could be the photographer who documented life in Lincoln in the early 1920s. But he didn’t like to make assumptions. So he did more research, discovering on that a Lew Cook in Lincoln had operated a radio and TV repair shop in the '40s, '50s and '60s.
He kept digging, and found on a family tree website that a Lew Cook had been born in 1913. That didn’t make sense. The boy would have been a 10-year-old at the time the photos were taken.
“And there’s no way a grade-school kid is taking that quality of images,†Hansen said. “I thought: There’s got to be someone else.’â€
Hansen contacted the person who had posted the Cook family tree, and the mystery was solved.
He learned Lew Cook’s father, Albra Mason Pierce Cook, had worked for the telephone company and the railroad, but spent his free time as a photographer.
Albra Cook and his wife, Mattie, raised a family at 2111 K St., now paved over by a school district parking lot near Lincoln High School.
He’d filled the basement with hundreds of the bulky glass negatives, but his family had long believed they were lost when the basement flooded.
Cremated remains, lost and found
Hansen worked backward, tracing the path the negatives took from the basement on K Street to his office.
The photographer’s son, Lew Cook, had evidently salvaged at least a portion of his father’s negatives, eventually taking them to his own house near 13th and Van Dorn streets.
Lew Cook had repaired TVs and radios for much of his life and, in the 1970s, opened a portrait studio in his home, according to old newspaper advertisements Hansen found. And he must have made prints from his father’s surviving negatives, too, because Hansen had bought those two on eBay with Lew Cook’s name and address on the back.
After Cook died, someone cleaning out his house found the negatives and contacted an antiques dealer. The dealer bought them and sold them to Seacrest, who gave them to Zimmer, who gave them to Hansen.
“At that point, I had the chain of provenance connected from me back to the Cook family,†Hansen said. “That was kind of fun to get that figured out.â€
Still, he kept digging. He found Lew Cook’s obituary from 1999, but when he searched for the grave, he came up empty.
If Lew Cook wasn’t buried at Wyuka Cemetery with his parents, where was he?
He asked Cook’s great-great nephew in Scottsbluff, who had posted his family tree online.
The family had never known where Cook’s remains were. When a niece saw his death notice in the newspaper in 1999, she asked the funeral home about them, and was told there was no record of interment.
They’d also heard that, at the time of their relative’s death, his roommate had told the funeral home Cook had no living relatives.
So Hansen contacted Roper and Sons, which had handled Lew Cook’s body more than 20 years ago.
“I told them about the research I was working on. I asked, ‘What happened to Lew Cook’s remains?’â€
And they said: We still have them.
‘We didn’t know where they were’
It doesn’t happen often, but Roper and Sons has been left with uncollected remains from time to time in its 120-year history.
“It’s very, very, very rare,†said Tom Roper, the funeral home’s president. “It kind of depends on family situations, if there is family.â€
If nobody claims the remains, the funeral home locks them in a steel container in its crematorium, and waits.
There’s nothing else it can do, Roper said.
“We don’t want to get rid of them. We don’t feel like we have the authority to do that.â€
That patience can pay off. About a decade ago, a man contacted the funeral home, ready to claim the cremated remains of his parents, who had died in the 1960s, Roper said.
The son had known where the ashes were; he just hadn’t been ready for them yet.
“He was just now at that point of coming to terms with the fact that both of his folks had passed, and he came and picked them up. I’m absolutely thrilled when that happens.â€
After hearing from the funeral home, Hansen contacted Cook’s great-great nephew in Scottsbluff.
Good news, he said.
Miner Perkins has no memories of Cook, but the family had long wondered what had happened to his ashes.
“It’s a big deal for us. We didn’t know where they were for so long, it’s really exciting to find him now.â€
Cook’s niece collected his ashes on Veterans Day. And the reunion’s timing was fitting, Perkins said.
Cook had served twice in the U.S. Naval Reserve — before and during World War II — and spent time at Pearl Harbor, though he never saw active duty. He may have served in the U.S. Army, too, in the late ’30s, though Hansen is still trying to confirm that.
The family is seeing whether he’s eligible for military funeral benefits, Perkins said.
It also launched a $2,600 online fundraiser to pay for a headstone, so it can give him a proper, though belated, burial alongside his parents.
‘It’s down the rabbit hole’
After his lunch with Zimmer, Hansen replaced the plastic tub with a purpose-built archival box, its interior lined with foam padding, its vertical corners reinforced with steel.
He pulled the negatives from their manila envelopes, cleaned the back sides of the slides — taking care not to touch the emulsion — and slipped them into bright-white protective sleeves.
He wears latex gloves when he handles them.
But now he’s not sure what to do with the collection.
Donating them to his department doesn’t make sense; the Capitol Commission’s archives focus on Capitol-related items, but only two of Albra Cook’s photos show the building. And Hansen wants to keep them together, though he will make high-resolution scans for the archives.
“I’ll have to figure out ultimately what the best repository for the negatives.â€
So he’s not done with them yet. He couldn’t estimate the number of hours he’s already spent searching for the story behind the negatives and their photographer, but he’s not complaining.
It’s interesting work, he said. “It’s the kind of thing you get so into, you lose track. It’s down the rabbit hole.â€
And this mystery was particularly rewarding, because it led to a family’s lingering question — Where was Lew Cook? — and he was able to answer it for them.
“They had no idea what happened to his remains. That was one of the pleasant sidetracks that was a result of this whole thing.â€
How to help
To donate to Lewis Cook's burial fund, go to and search "Help Bury WWII Veteran."