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: 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: 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: 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: Physical Evidence Premium
Gena Graddy is looking for a photograph of her Civil War ancestor William Joseph Taylor (1836 to 1895). She has a box of about a hundred unidentified tintypes and thinks one of them might be a picture of Taylor taken before the war. Graddy knows that Taylor was a married...
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Photo Detective: A Little Help from Your Friends Premium
One of the best ways to identify an image is by making it available to others. This week, rather than telling you how I solved a picture puzzle, I'd like to show you how Family Tree Magazine reader Janet Meleney is solving her own photo mystery—with a little help...
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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: 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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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: 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...
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