Calling All French Speakers

Mr. Mustache

     Today I'm looking for help. 

     As you may recall, I received a REALLY cool old French photo album from my sister for Christmas and have begun trying to locate it's original owners. At the front of the album are a handful of loose photos that have managed to stay with it all this time. (The man above with the ridiculously awesome mustache, for example.) And many of those images have hand-written notes on them.

Back of the Mr. Mustache photo

     Unfortunately, I've shown these notes to a couple of French speakers that I know and they've only been able to make out individual words or phrases. Their basic response has been something along the lines of "this handwriting is so old school that I can't understand all of it."

IDing a WWII Ship

     Longtime readers of this brand new blog will recall that I once promised a post about a World War II U.S. Navy submarine chaser. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) I was sidetracked by my encounter with Bill, then by an old photo album I received for Christmas. But today I hope to begin to right that long forgotten wrong.

     I'm still researching the history of the ship in this image (which I bought for $1 at a store called Cool Stuff Weird Things). But in order to get to that point, I had to first figure out the class (type) of ship using only the clues available in the image. Clearly the number "1277" jumps out as a potential lead, so that's where I decided to start my search...