Identifying
Photo Detective: Needle in a Haystack? Premium
Figure 1 Figure 2 As a genealogist you spend time trying to fit together the pieces of a person's life by locating vital records, evidence of activities and whatever else you can find. You hope to create a biography of that ancestor—part of the larger history of your...
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Photo 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...
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Photo 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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Photo Detective: Sibling Portrait Rivalry Premium
Irene Uffrecht-Peters knows the names of the boys, but not the girls, in this captivating photograph of the Schiff children taken in Germany. Family lore identifies the little boy left front as her great-grandfather Ludwig Schiff (born 1864). His other brothers Felix (1854) and Paul (1862) are most likely...
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Photo Detective: Weighty Accessory Premium
How an oversize necklace provides a date for these portraits
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Photo Detective: Petal Pushers 2 Premium
For my last column, I borrowed techniques from "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?": I asked the audience and phoned a friend. Several of you responded to my request for ideas about the blossoms on the ladies in this group portrait. Here's what I learned: A...
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Photo 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...
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Photo Detective: Between the Covers Premium
Figure 1 Figure 2 David Starr found a family album with about 80 photographs in it and could identify only 15. He randomly selected several images and submitted them to this column. His ancestors didn't take the time to write names on the backs of the images or underneath...
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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...
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Photo 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...
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