Photo Detective
Foreign Photos in the Family Album
This week I'm at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Conference. It's a huge event with folks attending from all over the globe. I love the international atmosphere and especially like looking at photographs taken around the world. Photos taken in foreign lands can be particularly challenging. Instead of...
Read More
A Family Portrait Photo Mystery
Lauren Hamilton submitted this photo with a few questions, but as soon as I saw it I thought, "uh oh, this might not be who Lauren and her cousin think it is."The cousins' great-great-grandfather John McCauley was a Mennonite minister in Ontario, and later an Evangelical minister in Iowa...
Read More
A Southern Photo Mystery
The story of a photograph is so much more than its simple details. This is a carte de visite (CDV) image. The mounted size of a CDV is 2.125 x 3.5 inches. The slight oval shadow on this picture signifies it was once in an album...
Read More
A Multi-Mystery Historical Baby Photo
Jim Moses recently found himself with a perplexing family photo mystery. When going through a trunk from his great-grandfather Luther Abner Moses (1860-1905) , he found an intriguing photo. It's a wonderful photo of a baby laughing. Everything in the trunk is related to Abner, but this photo is a puzzle...
Read More
Clues, Cousins and Contacts: Three Ways to Solve a Photo Mystery
What does it take to solve a picture mystery? In this case it's clues, cousins and contacts. June Thomazin is determined to solve this tintype mystery! I featured it in my Photo Detective column in the September 2010 Family Tree Magazine (you can get a download of that Photo Detective...
Read More
John L. Burns: Civil War Sharpshooter at Age 69
This week the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. For three days, July 1-3, 1863, Union and Confederate forces fought. When it was over, 50,000 had died. It was the bloodiest battle of the war. One of the men who survived the battle wasn't even...
Read More
Fathers and Sons from Readers
Last week I wrote about two famous fathers and asked you to submit photos of fathers and sons in your family album. Thank you very much for sending in your photos!Geraldine Rudloff emailed this photograph of her immigrant ancestor Hans Christian S. Hegsted holding one of his...
Read More
Famous Fathers: Happy Father’s Day
Father's Day wasn't official until 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation making it the third Sunday in June. President Richard Nixon made it a permanent holiday in 1972. Other presidents wanted to designate a day to honor fathers. President's Woodrow Wilson and Calvin...
Read More
Four Times the Mystery
There is so much to love in this photo collage--the smiling face, the cute baby, and the timeless shot of a mother and child. The problem is that Michael Thompson has no idea who she is. Each image is tiny, only about an inch in size. They were all glued...
Read More
A Hand-Colored Photo Gem
The other night my husband asked, "How do you find something to write about every week?" There's an easy answer: Every photo collection is unique, and every photo tells a story. You've been sharing photographs with me for more than a decade and no two images are exactly...
Read More