Photo Detective
Foreign Intrigue
Each photo has a life story. Who took it, why was it taken, and if it's in this column, who is it. This picture from Maureen Ballantine's collection has an additional issue—how did it get so damaged?The scan she sent me was so faded that I enhanced it using...
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What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing has been in the news lately relating to photo identification. According to Wikipedia, the term refers to the outsourcing of tasks to a community. The Library of Congress (LOC) is using the historical, photographic and genealogical community to help identify their photo mysteries. In its Flickr collection...
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Oral History and Family Photos
Behind every family photo is a story. It might be a simple tale of how your ancestor visited a photo studio or a complex story interwoven with local, national and family history. Bonnie Farver, Farver family historian for Pennsylvania, sent me this great portrait. The Farvers have an oral tradition...
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Friendship, Love and Truth in the Family Album
Pam Rolland is working her way through family albums in the possession of her aunt. She reports that she's been able to date and identify many of the pictures in them, but still has a few mysteries. This is one of them. It was in an...
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Images of Ancestors at Work
Happy Labor Day! It's a day that honors work so why not take a trip into the past to find pictures of your laboring ancestors. Some of my favorite images on the Library of Congress website are the pictures that show individuals in their...
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Hurricane of 1938: Before and After
I grew up on the Rhode Island shore and spent summers on the beach. In Rhode Island (and New England), we measure storms like this weekend's hurricane/tropical storm against the grandaddy of all New England hurricanes: the Hurricane of 1938. In the late 19th and early...
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Godfrey Update
It's week three of the project to identify all the faces in Gwen Prichard's family composite. In the first installment, I introduced this lovely composite and then last week I showed an original image from which one of the tiny portraits was taken. This week, Gwen wrote to...
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Tackling the Godfrey Family Photo
Last week's column focused on Gwen Prichard's family photo mystery. This small composite image is a genealogical lock. All Gwen has to do is find the key. In this case, the key is her family photo collection. Gwen spent last week comparing each face in this picture to...
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Godfrey Family Picture Puzzle
Gwen Prichard and her cousin Libby Claypool have quite the family photo mystery. The image is a composite of what appears to be several generations worth of Godfreys. Several years ago I saw something similar, but that woman didn't have a clue about the identity of the people in the...
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A Possible Identity for the Lady
Last week I wrote about Jay Kruizenga's photo of a woman with long hair. He read the column and quickly wrote back to say thank you. It appears that the lovely woman with the long locks has a name!He believe that this picture was taken 1883-85 because the cardstock...
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