One thing I wanted to show in the genealogical history of my
family was what life was like for our ancestors. Photography only came into
being in about the mid nineteenth century so unless you are lucky enough to
have aristocrats in your family that had oil painting of themselves you must
rely on documents like birth, marriage, death, census records and maybe a
journal or letters to tell their story.
So, I started
collecting old family photos from both my wife’s family and my own family
photos. The first anyone should do is to try and get the older family members
to identify the date, people and places in the old photos so you and future
generations know what they are looking at. A lot of people don’t think of
writing descriptions with their photos so once they are gone people must guess
who, what and when are in the photo. We should remember that new photos will be
old photos someday so adding descriptions to your photos is a good idea, not
making the same mistake that past generations made in their photos.
I had the
thought of trying to get photos from Google map of Addresses of our ancestors.
I found that only a few remain many lived in cities like New York, Glasgow or
Boston that have had urban renewal so fairly new buildings are where my
ancestors had lived. The churches where they were baptized and married are an
exception many have not changed that much over the centuries. I try to look for
old photos of the places that my ancestor had lived either through the
internet, libraries or historical societies that may have old photos and
newspaper of places that they had lived.
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