What you should know
- For decades, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum has been tracking photos of every person who died in the attacks, and it had a photo of all but two of the victims.
- The penultimate photo was added to the museum’s “In Memoriam” exhibit on Tuesday. More than 2,900 images hang in the special gallery, haunting reminders of the human cost of that terrible day. Now Albert Ogletree is part of the gallery.
- Staff are still looking for a photo of another missing victim: another cafeteria worker named Antonio Dorsey Pratt.
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NEW YORK — For decades, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum has been tracking photos of every person who died in the attacks, and it had a photo of every victim Minus two.
Until now, that is, with the penultimate photo added to the museum’s “In Memoriam” exhibit on Tuesday. More than 2,900 images hang in the special gallery, haunting reminders of the human cost of that terrible day. Now Albert Ogletree is part of the gallery.
Museum associate Grant Llera works at the gallery and was concerned about a missing photo.
“I felt like there was definitely a hole in the story,” Llera said.
He spent nearly eight months filling that gap, with the same goal: to find a photo of Ogletree, a 49-year-old cafeteria worker who died in the North Tower.
“We found out that he had been married, but in 2004, his wife had died,” museum curator Jan Ramirez said, adding that little else was known about Ogletree.
Llera called Ogletree a “mystery.” She turned to Facebook, where she found Ogletree’s stepdaughter in Harlem in the summer of 2021. But that moment of hope ended in disappointment.
“She informed me that he was a camera-shy man and that his personal property had been lost after 9/11,” Llera said.
Unable to find a photo there, Llera searched Ancestry.com and determined that Ogletree had grown up in a Detroit suburb. Weeks after arriving at a high school there, the nearly 8-month search ended with an email containing a school photo of a young ninth-grader, Albert Ogletree.
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9-11 Memorial & Museum
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“I would say I probably jumped a foot. I was very excited,” Llera said. “I would say more for Albert than for me.”
Ogletree’s photo has now been added to the 9/11 Museum gallery, finally giving the name a face.
“This little trace of him brings back the words, no day will erase you from the memory of time,” Llera said.
That’s what the museum is about, Llera said, and it’s why staff will continue to search for a photo of another missing victim: another cafeteria worker named Antonio Dorsey Pratt.
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