Generations in Focus: Preserving Family Memories Through Photography

Family pictures were originally portraits created in a studio by a professional photographer. Taken by professionals in their studios, the sessions were grand events! Imagine the excitement – spending the whole day getting dressed up for the one and only time in your life you were likely to have your picture taken. With the advent of the Kodak camera amateur photographers were able to record the family in any location. In these photographs we see how our ancestors lived. We see their friends and extended families over for a game or a picnic, the gang for a party, their homes inside and out. We might see them at work. They took pictures of prized possessions and events in their lives. There was an explosion in the number of family pictures recording every occasion. I have a collection of antique cameras owned by my ancestors. The very ones they held as they captured the moments in their lives. I also inherited the negative collection from my mother. To be useful in genealogy we need to be able to identify the people and places in the images and fix a date to them. The process of scanning them and then trying to identify who was in them is helped in part by being able to identify which camera was used. Cameras and film became available at a fixed date and later fell out of common usage. Each camera used either a different type of film or created an image of different ratios on the film. We will look at sorting the images by these different film stock and size ratios using this information to add to the knowledge we have about each photograph. Each piece of information we gather about the image helps us to identify the subject. The most important clue is to be able to fix the date that the photo was taken. This helps us narrow who the subject might be. No single clue can provide a date, but the sum of the evidence provides a good estimate. Clothing, hair styles, poses locations and backgrounds help us in our quest to identify the people and places. I was lucky to inherit the family negative collection. If people do not write on the beck of photographs, they definitely don’t identify who is captured on the negative and what was the date as well as the occasion. The process is like a great detective mystery. We just need to learn how to read the clues and follow them! Our family story is made richer with the addition of photographs. Names become individuals we can recognize and relate to.