“I think this was Nathaniel Cutton’s sister. We always called her Aunt Margaret.”
—Anonymous, from the back of a photograph
c. 400 B.C.
Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti formally records the creation of an inverted image formed by light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened room.
1727
Professor J. Schulze discovers that light darkens silver nitrate. This becomes the basis of photographic processes.
1800
Thomas Wedgwood makes the first photograms using natural objects on leather and paper coated with silver nitrate.
1816
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce uses the camera obscura to produce images on photosensitive paper; ten years later he creates a permanent image.
1839
William Henry Fox Talbot announces his paper photographic process to the Royal Society of London.
When was the last time you looked at your family photographs? If you haven’t taken them out of their storage place recently, now is the time. One of the first steps in compiling a genealogy is to examine all possible sources of information in your home. Photographs are a valuable resource for family historians.
A family photograph collection is a direct link to your past. Family history is, after all, about the individuals in these photographs, and images can bring the past to life and provide insights into the lives of our ancestors. Photographs show who attended weddings, birthday celebrations, and other important family events. They may provide you with a sense of your ancestor’s personality. Every photograph of Uncle Charlie may show him clowning for the camera while Aunt Minnie smiles demurely.
Photographs can even unite families. Genealogists in the same family may share research and discover that their photo collections contain copies of the same images. The unidentified photos in your collection may have names and dates in a relative’s. You may have an unidentified photograph of a young child, while a distant relative has not only the child’s name, but several photographs of that same individual at different ages. Connecting with family enriches your genealogical research and can even expand your collection of family pictures.
Collection of the Author
Photographers often took multiple portraits in one sitting, circa 1908.
General Guidelines
As genealogists, it is important for us to compile the visual history of our families as well as the written information. Documents provide data, but pictures show you the past.
Each image contains a series of clues that can assist you with your research. A photographer’s imprint may reveal the places where your ancestor lived, or an artifact depicted in an image may be something you own today. By closely examining a picture, you may spot a chair that matches one in your house. Photographs can give you clues to the previous owner of an object, clues that might not appear in probate documents or other records.
Clothing clues can date images, establish ethnic connections, and reveal personality. Images of ancestors dressed in attire from a particular country provide evidence of their immigrant roots and fascinating details about their native culture. You may even discover an ancestor’s political or social viewpoints through an image. For instance, your great-great grandmother might be wearing the pants-like bloomers adopted by early dress reform advocates Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, while men’s lapels might sport buttons endorsing presidential candidates. Interpreting costume details is a key part of understanding and dating family photos.
Photos, even identified ones, raise questions about your family. Why was grandfather wearing that costume? Where are all the children in the group photograph? Using your skills as a genealogist, you may be able to answer those questions and bring new meaning to your family album.
Family photograph collections are as diverse as families themselves—their composition and size depends, in part, on geography and economic status. If a family lived in a rural area that lacked a photographer’s studio, there might not be any portraits of them. Affluent families enjoyed photography as a recreational pursuit, while urban, working-class families had little time or money for such things. The photographic record of your family depends on the variables of interest, economics, place of settlement, access to a photographer or equipment, and even religious affiliation. Some religions, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), originally discouraged members from having photographs taken. If your ancestors were part of a religious group that discouraged photography, your collection may be smaller. When looking at the photographs in your possession, remember to think about your family in the context in which they lived.
One of the contributing factors to the size of a family collection was the novelty of photography in the nineteenth century. In your collection, you may have several different types of images of one ancestor taken around the same time. Photographers advertised the newest techniques and styles of photographs—method, content, and purpose changed often—to entice customers to return to their studios. Our ancestors, as consumers, sought the latest trend or new technique in order to capture the best representation of themselves.
Collection of the Author
Photographers lured customers into their studio by advertising their skills. This poster dates from Christmas 1897.
Technological limitations, however, influenced the quantity and content of photos. For instance, all photographs in the early nineteenth century were taken under natural light. Artificial lighting wasn’t available until the 1880s. The limits of the early equipment also influenced the type of image that could be taken. A basic understanding of photographic methods used in the past can provide background and additional hints in your investigation of your family photographs.
Evaluating, dating, and identifying a photograph is a multistep process. Determining the method of photography, researching the photographer, appraising the costume, and verifying the genealogical information are all important steps toward solving your photo mystery. Along the way, you’ll consult experts and conduct library research. The process can be time-consuming, but very rewarding.
To get started, you must develop a new way of looking at photographs—the smallest detail can yield an important clue or the answer to a family mystery. A family heirloom, such as a piece of jewelry, might enable you to identify a person in a photograph. A sign in the background or a photographer’s studio prop can help date an image. You will need to scrutinize each photograph closely to itemize all the particulars.
Grant Emison
A key similar to the one shown helps to keep track of the ancestors in this photo.
Key to Group Portrait Shown
Include name and life dates for each individual.
Tools of the Trade
There are a few basic tools that assist with the investigative process.
Magnifying Glass or Photographer’s Loupe
Noticing the smallest details can help you solve a picture riddle. Look for tiny clues with a magnifying glass (any kind will do) or a photographer’s loupe, a small magnifying device that professional photographers use. You can purchase magnifying glasses at any office supply store, drugstore, or chain store such as Wal-Mart. To buy a loupe, try the local camera shop; prices range from less than ten dollars to more than fifty.
Cotton or Nonlatex (and Powder-Free) Medical Examination Gloves
No matter how clean you think your hands are, each time you handle your photographs without wearing lint-free cotton gloves or nonlatex ones, you leave behind a little bit of dirt and oil. You can find cotton gloves in some hardware stores, but I prefer to buy multiple pairs from specialty suppliers. Examination gloves are available at warehouse stores and at pharmacies. Wash the cotton gloves after use and dispose of the nonlatex ones. See the appendix for a list of suppliers.
Measuring Tape
A measuring tape with both inches and centimeters allows you to compare your images to size charts that can help you determine what photographic method was used to take the picture.
Pens and Pencils for Marking Images
As long as you write on the back of your images using the right pencil or pen, you shouldn’t cause any damage. When identifying heritage photographs, use soft lead pencils, such as the graphite ones used by artists. Pens for writing on plastic-coated prints need to be quick-drying, permanent, and odorless when dry. Check their packaging to see if writing implements are photo-safe.
Protective Sleeves, Photo Albums, and Storage Containers
Look for acid- and lignin-free pages and plastic overlays made from polypropylene a non polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC) or other inert plastic. Stay away from albums with magnetic pages that contain adhesive—it can damage your images. The best albums also have slipcases that protect pages from dust. Storage boxes should be made of the same materials as albums and have reinforced corners.
Scanner
Scanners are great photo identification tools—they enable you to enlarge features in photographs, copy images, and upload pictures to the Web to share with relatives. Some have capabilities for scanning negatives and slides. Before you purchase a scanner, make sure it’s compatible with your existing computer equipment, read reviews, and ask friends. You can enlarge or reduce photographs once you’ve scanned them at a minimum of 600 dpi color and at least 100 percent scale. It’s advisable to save your images as tif files, an uncompressed image format.
Worksheets
Record your research, measurements, and observations on one of the worksheets available for download at familytreeuniversity.com/familyphotodetective to keep track of your data.
Family photo research requires developing a research strategy, keeping good records, and having patience. Picture researchers and genealogists use a wide variety of sources to solve a problem, and one of the primary rules of genealogy and photo research is to cite those sources. Citations validate the information found and provide a reference point for further research. If your resources are properly cited, anyone could pick up your research and know exactly where you got what.
Break your picture research project down into segments that can be worked on one at a time. It’s easier to piece together the history of an image and draw conclusions regarding the identity of the events, persons, or family members depicted if you work on only one photograph at a time.
With your own photographs it may be difficult to notice what clues exist because you’ve looked at them so many times. The first step in working with your family photographs is to pretend you’ve never seen them before. Find the clues using a magnifying glass or scanner to enlarge sections. Move across the picture in a methodical pattern, carefully examining each person in the image from head to toe, as well as the background.
Collection of the Author
Making Copies of Photos
Whether you want to make copies for research purposes or duplicate photographs in a relative’s collection, you’ll want to explore the options.
Note everything you discover, but don’t add up all your clues until you’ve finished your research. Use a photo worksheet (available at familytreeuniversity.com/familyphotodetective) to record your findings and citations. Carry the worksheets and copies of the images with you on research trips. Attach a photocopy of the image to the worksheet to keep the photo on hand without damaging or losing the original.
Group portraits require a modification of the worksheet. In addition to attaching a photocopy, making a sketch of a group photo can serve as a key to the details in the image. Assign a number to each person in a group image to help with identification and recording information (see the Key to Group Portrait Shown sidebar).
There are four steps involved in developing a successful research plan:
Sneak Peeks
If you want to take a sneak peek at photo collections from other families try Flickr <www.flickr.com>. Individuals, museums, and archives upload pictures to this website to share them with others. It’s like a picture wiki. You can comment on images to help identify them, take a visual walk through history and, if the Flickr contributor allows, you can even download photos.
On Flickr, anyone who posts images is called a contact. Finding new contacts is easy. First, sign up for a Flickr account following the instructions on the homepage. Basic Flickr use is free, but if you want unlimited uploads, there is a pro-level membership offered for $24.95 a year.
After you’ve signed up, click on Contacts (located in the top menu), then select “Find your friends” in the drop-down menu. This will help you find individuals and organizations (or other genealogists) that participate on the site. Use the search box on the bottom of the screen to search for organizations or keywords to locate appropriate Flickr pages.
Click the link to look at their Flickr page, known as a photostream, then click Profile. You’ll learn more about the organization, usage rights and when they joined Flickr. In some cases, along the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a list of other collections (groups of images) that this contact has uploaded. Add an organization or individual to your contact list so you can see when they add new images to their photostreams.
Some Flickr streams you may want to follow are:
United States National Archives <www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives>: has a Flickr page and uses collections and sets. For instance, I was looking for images of women so I clicked on Collection, then selected one called “women’s history.” Doing that led me to subsets of images so that I could look at images from World War II or “Women in Mathew Brady pictures.” Selecting the Mathew Brady subset directed me to a page with a short overview of the collection and thumbnails of the images. Click on any one of those small images takes to you a page for that image, which contains information on copyright, and any caption info. Right click on the image to see different downloadable versions of it.
Library of Congress <www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress>: There are plenty of photos to view on the LOC page, but there is also a collection of Illustrated Newspaper Supplements from the New York Tribune. It’s a fascinating group of covers from the New York Tribune beginning in 1909. The LOC is using crowd-sourcing to help solve their unidentified photo mysteries. For instance, in their collection “Mystery Photos solved” they asked Flickr users to annotate twenty-two unidentified travel scenes. Within days, they had their answers.
George Eastman House <www.flickr.com/photos/george_eastman_house>: This photostream isn’t the largest collection of online images, but it provides an overview of the history of photography from daguerreotypes to a lovely group of autochromes (colored images from the early twentieth century).
National Archives of the United Kingdom <www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives>: Here you can view historic or contemporary images or narrow your selection by using the menu under the main title. “Collections” (in the menu bar) lets you see specific images arranged by group while “sets” organizes them into smaller categories. “Archives” allows you to select images by the date they were taken or when they were uploaded to Flickr. You can time travel to the United Kingdom through nine hundred years worth of material in their archive.
Library of Canada <www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac>: The Library and Archives of Canada post behind the scenes images of their museums, but they don’t stop there. You can also view items from their collections.
There are many things that can help you determine the identity of the mysterious people in your family photos; several different types of clues exist. While not all family photographs will have the photographer’s name and address—which is one of the best and most revealing pieces of information—more general clues, like photographic method and costume, can help you date the picture.
One of your first steps should be to try to determine the date of the image by the technique used to take the picture. Each method or style of photography has identifiable characteristics. By comparing the image in question to a chart of stylistic differences, a range of dates can be determined. (See chapters three, four, and five.)
Details in the picture that you may have initially missed will become apparent under close examination. Props, backdrops, and signage, for example, can help identify when and where an image was taken. Facial characteristics can also assist in the identification process. (See chapter eight.)
If the photographer is identified, you can determine when he was in business, which can help assign a specific date and location to an image. These are important facts for your genealogical research. (See chapter six.)
The clothing worn by the people in the picture can provide a wealth of information. Identifying the style of clothing in an image is crucial to dating the photograph. Women’s clothing, in particular, can be broken down into distinct features that can place an image within a time frame. (See chapter nine.)
What do you do if you can’t identify a photo?
If you follow this advice, you will gain a better understanding of the images in your collection, the types of photographs you have, and approximate dates for each. In the best cases, you will develop feasible conclusions about the identity of the individuals in the photographs. When you’ve added up all the clues, start by determining a reasonable date for the photo; follow that with a tentative guess at the identity of the people pictured and prove that with genealogical research and family help.
If your first attempts at research are unsuccessful, put the photograph aside and work on another. The information you find during research on another image may provide solutions to the first.
CASE STUDY: More Than Meets the Eye
Barbara Dimunno
The process of solving a photographic mystery is dependent on your knowledge of family history, as well as a variety of identifying clues. It isn’t always possible to put a name to a face—there will always be times when missing pieces of genealogical information or insufficient evidence in the photograph will work against you—but you won’t know that until you start examining the picture and researching its clues. It’s important to follow a series of photo identification steps and develop new ways of looking at pictures.
Seeing the Evidence: Family History
Barbara DiMunno thinks that either her great aunt Lillian (Clark) Hewitt (1873–1955) or Lillian’s mother Harriet (Ogden) Clark (1842–1912) originally owned the photo to the right. She is trying to verify a time frame for the image so she can work on identifying the people depicted.
Type of Photograph
Different types of photographs existed in the nineteenth century, including shiny metal daguerreotypes (1839–c.1860), glass ambrotypes (1854–c.1870), iron pictures called tintypes (1856–twentieth century), and paper photographs (1850–today). In the twentieth century, the majority of images taken were paper. In this example, the picture is a paper print. Unfortunate, because it doesn’t help narrow the timeframe.
Photographer’s Imprint
Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photos contain the name of the photographers as well as the town where they operated their studios. Using city directories and directories of photographers working in specific areas, you can usually determine a span of dates for when the photo was taken. Unfortunately, there is no photographer’s imprint on this picture, but the presence of a photographer’s white backdrop, foliage, and dirt in the foreground confirms that this image was taken outdoors, probably by an itinerant photographer. This could mean that the family lived in a rural area that was visited by a traveling photographer.
Internal Clues: Personality, Clothing, and People
The major person in the photograph is the mother, and her personality is apparent in the way she dominates the image with her stance. With one hand on her hip and the other on the photographer’s chair, she draws attention to her tiny waist which was no doubt held in place by a restrictive corset commonly worn in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fact that she wears such an undergarment is a costume clue. According to Beatrice Fontanel in Support and Seduction: The History of Corsets and Bras (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), these undergarments were popular from the 1870s through 1914. This provides a tentative time frame for the image. This mother followed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fashion ideal of having a waist small enough that her husband’s hands could touch while encircling it.
A costume encyclopedia, like John Peacock’s 20th Century Fashion (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), indicates that the mother’s dress with the full collar and sleeves resembles dresses worn circa 1906. The deep V-neck opening, white high-necked shirt, and tight lower sleeves with fullness at the upper arms are also characteristic of that period. This clothing information suggests the picture was taken between 1900 and 1910. A ten-year timeframe allows for stylistic variations.
An infant is the next subject in this family photograph. Let’s hope this picture was taken in warm weather, since the baby is naked upon a folded handmade quilt. It was and still is common to photograph an infant without clothes to show off its perfection. If you look closely, you’ll see a pair of hands holding the baby at the waist. A woman’s skirt is visible underneath the chair. There is no clue as to her identity. It is also difficult to tell if the baby is male or female. Finding a child born between 1900 and 1910 in genealogical data could identify the whole family.
The three girls in this photograph are wearing dresses of similar design and fabric and lockets. The four children appear to be about two years apart in age. The younger of the girls on the right is standing very still with one hand on the chair. The oldest child wears her hair in a topknot much like her mother. Girls’ attire mimicked women’s fashions. She appears to be holding something in her hands, but what it might be isn’t clear. That she is leaning toward her younger sister perhaps suggests that the girls have a close relationship.
It isn’t apparent what was happening off-camera to capture the attention of the children. While the mother is looking directly into the camera, all the children are glancing off to the side of the photographer. Very likely, an assistant was attracting their attention with a toy. As every parent knows, nothing is more difficult to capture on film than an active child. These four children are very well-behaved for their age, and it was probably a combination of a mother’s strict warning and the actions of the assistant that made for a successful portrait.
Drawing a Conclusion
The final step in photo identification is adding up all the clues to develop a conclusion. In this case, the mother’s costume provided a time frame, yet even with a date for the photograph, Barbara DiMunno is unable to name the family in this portrait. While Lillian (Clark) Hewitt (1873–1955) would be the right age for the woman in this portrait, other pictures of her confirm that she is not the mother pictured. By using observation and research, Barbara DiMunno now knows a lot more about this photograph, even though she can’t name the subjects.
Try applying these techniques to your photographs and see if you can uncover new family history or an interesting story. You might be surprised by what you discover.