Just before Christmas, Deveta Johnson saw something in the trash in Norristown that looked like an old pile of grocery bags.

She looked closer and found a tattered photo album with hundreds of World War II-era snapshots of African Americans, in wartime Europe and going about their daily lives in rowhouse Philadelphia.

"Wait a minute," mused Johnson, who had listened to her grandfather's countless war stories. "This shouldn't be in the trash."

Her decision to take the album home and show it to her mother, Valoree Nelson, has preserved for posterity what might have been lost to a landfill. In mid-January, Nelson turned the album over to the Historical Society of Montgomery County.

"I walked there in the rain with my grandson," said Nelson, a retiree from Norristown.

Experts on historic collections who have seen the photos called the album a rare find and remarkable portrait of African American life in the mid-20th century.

"African American history has been for so many years neglected," said Jeffrey R. McGranahan, the historical society's collections manager. "You really get the sense that these were real people who went places and had family gatherings."

The snapshots so intrigued McGranahan that he began searching for clues to the identity of the tall man who seems to be the thread that holds the album together.

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