Old Family Photos
Finding old family photos of your ancestors is always a thrill, but often, they are elusive. Maybe you have photographs of your ancestors, but they are unlabeled! (Sigh...) Who is actually in THAT photo?
You need strategies to understand and identify those unidentified individuals in your ancestors' photographs. Learn about the five different types of photographs, the step by step process of identifying the individuals and important clues that can be found within your family photos.
New to working with old family photos? I suggest you start with 4 Tips to Identify Unknown Family Photographs.
Links to get started exploring our ancestors' photographs:
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Identify Your Ancestor In That Photograph
How to identify your ancestor in an old photograph is tough. I get it. Genealogy researchers often are the recipients of a family’s old photographs. Yet, these old family photos come to us unlabeled and unorganized. The task of identifying your ancestors in the photographs seems daunting if not impossible. Could your family photo collection contain a great grandparent who is simply not recognized? You crave a resource with strategies to guide them through the steps of identifying their old family photos. You want a resource that will allow you to be strategic in analyzing and labeling your old family photos. Why? Identifying that old family photograph allows that individual’s…
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How To Pull Genealogy Clues From Your Old Family Photographs
Old family photographs can tell the stories of our ancestors’ lives and provide valuable clues to finding more genealogy records. [This post is sponsored by The Imaging Alliance; however, all thoughts and opinions are my own.] Old family photos tell the stories of our ancestors. They tell a story of physical characteristics passed down from generation to generation. They tell the stories of special occasions. They tell the stories of everyday life. If you have been a longtime reader of Are You My Cousin?, you know how fortunate I am to have inherited a large collection of family photographs. My great-grandmother Esther Richardson grew up in the early 1900’s when…
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Photo Organization for Genealogy Researchers – Resources for Getting Started
Getting our family’s photographs is organized is tough. It doesn’t seem to matter if I am organizing the photographs I took on my phone this morning, or trying to decide how organize and store my ancestors’ photographs dating back over 100 years. I never know quite how to begin the sorting or which organizing system I should use. So, I’m turning to the experts! Photo Organization for Genealogy Researchers Today I am sharing with you in video format three (3) fantastic organizers and bloggers who can help shed light on our photo organization woes. Actually one writer is a professional organizer AND a genealogist! (Hi, Caroline!) Note: This video was…
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15 Posts To Help You Identify Old Photographs
Techniques and strategies to identify old photographs. Date an old photo and find other important clues in your old family photos. Do you have unidentified photographs of your ancestors in your collection? I think many genealogy researchers do. Among my own personal collection I have a large number of photographs of unknown individuals. It’s actually a wonderful problem to have! Are they family? Friends? Neighbors? I’m really not sure on some. I expect it’s a mixture of both. When you come across old family photos that are not labeled, the question very quickly becomes “How do we identify those individuals? Is it even possible?”. As researchers, we must first educate…
