Young people are warned to be careful what they put online, as anything posted could permanently haunt them. Potential employers might find your youthful indiscretions. Reputations are at stake. And yet, the constant flood of new information and the burying of old information are realities of the online landscape.
Many systems are shut down or fade away. Old accounts are closed and purged. Huge amounts of content disappear every day. There are, some trusted information repositories, where information may be retained for a long period of time. Perhaps for long enough….
However, in the grand scheme of things, Internet information is fleeting…
Grave Markers
Compared to a web page, a grave marker can have a long life expectancy. The oldest known legible grave marker in the United States is from 1644. Most grave markers last long past the time when the graves are visited. Life moves on, descendants visit less and less often. Whole cemeteries sometimes get forgotten.
And yet, many people want to have a memorial for their loved ones who have died. Many cemeteries stay busy until their land is all occupied with graves with markers on most of the graves.
And while we may remember the person memorialized on the marker, the rest of the world moves on.
Remembering
I was photographing a columbarium adjacent to the Abbey Mausoleum at Westview Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia, when I encountered this niche marker for Jimmy Miller Mitchell. I of course followed the instructions to “Google: Jimmy Mitchell Model.” Since Jimmy has died in 2014, I was expecting sparse results, if any. “Jimmy Mitchell” is a common name, and “model” has many contexts: car models, a business model, the physics model of the universe, etc…
I don’t know what might have been found in a 2014 Google search, however the 2026 search was not fruitful.
What I found was a bunch of social media influencers, athletes, businessmen, a minister, and many others. No results that were evidently this Jimmy Mitchell. The Google search failed? Then I noticed the birth year of 1925 and realized a different approach may be needed. Searching on archive.org, I found a book on “California Fashion” that had three photos of a woman named Jimmy Mitchell who was a model.
Returning to Google using “AI Mode,” I did get a better result:
“Jimmy Mitchell” refers to several different individuals depending on the context:
1. 1950s Fashion Model
A model named Jimmy Mitchell was featured in notable mid-century advertisements, such as a 1954 campaign for Joyce sandals where he was styled in Rudi Gernreich clothing.
The reference link for that item led me to an Instagram post of a 1954 advertisement with Jimmy Mitchell as the model. So Google AI did deliver, albeit with the wrong pronoun…
Life goes on…
I will try to find more images of Jimmy and post them here with the metadata “Jimmy Mitchell model” in the hopes that if someone reads her niche marker and follows the instructions will find something of interest and relevance.
At least for as long as her niche marker is legible…..? Maybe.