President's Pen - December 2024
From an early age, before I knew what a genealogist was, I was fascinated with the old photographs and stories that my mother, father, and grandparents shared with me. As time progressed, I began to investigate the history and stories about the individuals in these priceless artifacts. To augment my research into these treasures, I purchased three books: Unlocking the Secrets in Old Photographs, by Karen Frisch-Ripley, Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs, by Maureen A. Taylor, and Dressed for the Photographer – Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900, by Joan Severa. Then I took Sara Cochran’s introductory course on preserving my family photographs. It was a game changer!
As the archivist of her family history, Sara has extensively researched the history of photography to date, label, organize, and preserve the vast collection of her photographic heritage. Sara explained that by knowing the progression of photographic milestones from glass plates to tintypes to film, we can narrow down the date when a particular image was taken. Using clues found on cabinet cards coupled with a knowledge of clothing styles, we can further narrow our focus to discover where and when the photograph was taken. The next step is to identify the person or persons in the photo. This is where our knowledge of genealogical research comes into play.
One of Sara’s statements about finding images in unlikely places struck a chord with me. While searching for a photograph for my brother’s retirement celebration, I stumbled upon a treasure trove of old photos, including tintypes, cabinet cards, and early black and white images in a Christmas-red May Company box. My paternal grandmother had collected them for me, but the box was stored at my parent’s home while I moved from apartment living to married life. The unopened box followed Owen and I when we moved into our current Whittier home in the late 1980s. Grandma’s box contained photos of three branches of her family – the Glovers, Labermans, and Doergeses. It was genealogical gold!
After sorting and identifying our photographs, our next step depends upon how we want to preserve, organize, or share our findings. There are as many ways as possible to do these steps are there are branches on our family trees. Some choices include photo albums, scrapbooks, digital photo books, family newsletters, family Facebook postings, regional history center collections, and attaching identified photos to online ancestry accounts. The important thing to remember is that the more we share our research, the more we are preserving these artifacts for posterity.
Sara’s presentation about the history of photography, how to organize and digitize our collections, and how to preserve and create a family history heirloom is especially important today because of the preponderance of smartphone photography. Will the metadata imbedded in these images be readable or recordable in the future? Will future descendants know who the people are in these electronic photographs? How many of us print or attach these photos to family history files, or upload them into our genealogy software? Thoughts to ponder as we work to preserve both the past and present for future generations.