Edward Lycett, Designer for Faience Company, Brooklyn - NYTimes.com

A photograph by Norman Baynard, from about 1950, in an exhibition at the San Diego History Center highlighting his work

Mr. Baynard ran a photo studio in the Logan Heights neighborhood of central San Diego. (After his death in 1986, his son Arnold gave the archive to the History Center.) Mr. Baynard was colorblind, so his wife, Frances, occasionally hand-tinted his black-and-white shots. He kept somewhat haphazard records, jotting down customers’ names on index cards.

Photographs of Frances Clalin Clayton, who disguised herself and pretended to be a Union soldier named Jack Williams.

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But in its 1880s heyday, its main designer, Edward Lycett (pronounced lye-SET), worked with retailers nationwide, including Tiffany & Company. He specialized in bulbous vases and ewers with Moorish filigree lids, dolphin handles, gilded spider-web textures and Japanese chrysanthemum motifs. Newspapers described the work as a “triumph in the line of faience” that “astonishes art circles.”

“It’s kind of like breathing life into this old story,” she said during a recent interview at a coffee shop near the former premises of Faience. She had just spent a futile hour rummaging through the musty basement below the sports bar, where no forgotten Lycett account books and molds had turned up.

Tracking Lycett’s paper trail and scattered ceramics has occupied Barbara Veith, an independent curator in Brooklyn, on and off for the last 15 years.

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For the Richmond, Va., show Lycett descendants have lent his porcelain portrait of a tambourine player and handwritten formulas for glazes and clays. Ms. Veith has borrowed vessels painted with ivy and birds from prominent New York collectors, including Robert A. Ellison Jr., who is giving much of his holdings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Michael and Marjorie Loeb, who have packed an Upper East Side town house in Manhattan with Victorian furniture and paintings.

Generations of families hired him to document baptisms, weddings, baseball games, choir performances, grocery store ribbon-cuttings, political fundraisers, airport arrivals and funerals. His upwardly mobile patrons posed alongside their new cars, swimming pools, backyard citrus trees and diplomas.

Visitors to the History Center have been supplying captions for an exhibition of 500 images that opens next Friday: “Portrait of a Proud Community: Norman Baynard’s Logan Heights 1939-1985.” Many of the families portrayed, the staff has learned, moved to San Diego from the segregated South.

BLACK HISTORY IN PHOTOS

Little evidence remains of the Faience Manufacturing Company in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This pottery company failed in the 1890s, and its former headquarters, on Greenpoint Avenue near the waterfront, has served over the years as a pencil factory and an S-and-M club and now contains a sports bar.

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Ms. Veith has organized a show, “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company,” which runs through June 19 at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature at the University of Richmond, with a catalog from the University of Richmond Museums. The gathering of about 40 eclectic pieces, Ms. Veith said, “is like a conversation of lots of different personalities.”

African-American families have been descending on the San Diego History Center for the last few months, leafing through mid-20th-century photographs of their ancestors and relatives. The History Center owns about 30,000 negatives and prints by Norman Baynard, a self-trained African-American photographer, and is now trying to identify his clients.

“Themes kept emerging about escaping racism,” said Chris Travers, the director of the center’s photograph collection.

Next year the Brooklyn Museum will present an expanded version of the exhibition, and Ms. Veith said she hoped to explore Faience’s competitors in Greenpoint, including the Union Porcelain Works and the Empire China Works. For now Greenpoint’s heritage is best seen in the American Wing at the Met. Balconies and transparent storage cases there contain Faience and Union Porcelain pieces with gilded floral patterns and handles in the forms of bears and birds.

Harrowing tales have surfaced, including that of a 12-year-old girl’s arriving alone on a bus with her money sewn into her clothes, and of a grandfather who had been run out of Arkansas for trying to unionize sharecroppers.

Lycett came to New York from his native Staffordshire in England in 1861, she said, as a newly divorced father with two preschoolers in tow. He soon started supporting the family by painting china, including dinnerware patterned with eagles and clouds for the White House.