Photo Detective: Picking Apart the Past Premium
Patti Sanda inherited about 100 photographs. Good news for any genealogist, except the majority are unidentified cabinet cards, cartes de visite and tintypes. Now, she must attempt to name the images' subjects by matching them up with the individuals in her family tree. She can succeed if she tackles one...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Men’s Clothing Premium
Only a small percentage of the photographs submitted to this column for identification purposes are of men. Is it possible that more of our male ancestral photographs are identified or did fewer men have their picture taken? Whatever the reason, assigning a date to a male portrait presents particular...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Marital Mystery Premium
Rikki Martin has a confusing family photograph. She can identify the posed group as her great-great-grandfather Orton Yaddow, his children and one of his wives. But is the woman with the child on her lap Yaddow's first or second wife? Before immigrating to the United States from Quebec, Canada, in...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Identifying an Illustration Premium
Sometimes things aren't quite what they appear. Maxine Leonard's aunt and uncle gave her this picture when she was 5 after she became upset they were moving away. Leonard has treasured the ornate framed illustration of a child in front of a Christmas tree because it reminds her of her...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Paint a Family Picture Premium
Cousins Catherine Keele Woodard and Millie Zey are trying to date this cased image, which, according to family lore, is a painting completed on the day an ancestor graduated from an English university. The image was given to Zey by her father, who received it from his grandfather William...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Rescuing the Past Premium
Steven Barcomb often drove by the house his wife's family had owned for about 50 years. One day, he noticed that someone was cleaning out the house and had discarded a large box of unlabeled 19th-century photographs. Thinking they were probably abandoned family pictures, he rescued them from the trash...
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Photo Detective: Aging Well Premium
I've spent a lot of time this month cleaning out every nook and cranny in my house. All this tossing of goods made me think about the clothes people hang onto as they age. Dating a photograph of an older person presents a unique dilemma: Is the subject wearing...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Long-Distance Call for Help Premium
Joanne Wallace owns copies of these undated portraits of her great-grandparents, Patrick Wallace and Sarah (Foley, or Folan) Wallace. She knows almost nothing about their lives in America and would like to learn more. Unfortunately, she lives in Hong Kong, which makes genealogical research possible only from a distance. All's...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Petal Pushers Premium
Every photo question is a little different. Take this one, for instance: Sonya Tootle's relatives told her the boy in the front is her great-grandfather Herbert Seymour Scholes (born in 1909). This is a likely identification, but what's curious about this picture is the flowers. All but one of...
Read MorePhoto Detective: Not in the Family Premium
Some of those unidentified photographs in your collection may not depict your family. Long before People magazine, our ancestors were fascinated by the famous and infamous of their generation, and they collected photographs of them. Sold by bookstores, stationery shops and individual photographers, these images often ended up in family...
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