3 Easy Best Practices For the Photos You Take Today
Trust me. Your descendants will thank you if you follow these three best practices. Our ancestors didn't take as many pictures as we do today. They had film cameras or had to go to a studio to document a moment. A photo do-over wasn't as easy as it...
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Old Photos: The Secret Ingredient to Discovering Family History
You're probably wondering what I mean by photo clues being the secret ingredient. Think of your family history as a recipe. In my grandmother's terms, that would consist of a pinch of this and a pinch of that. Genealogy is the same way: We look at...
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On the Web: Breathtaking Panoramic Photos of Ancestors’ Towns
The next time you need a break, don't book a plane ticket. First take a trip into the past in a panoramic photo. The Library of Congress has quite a collection. A panoramic photo can be a single image or a set of pictures aligned together that offer an expansive...
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The Most Important Question To Ask Cousins About Old Photos
Way back in the 1990s, Roma Bennett's cousin gave her this photo. At the time her cousin told her she didn't know anything about this tintype. Hmmm. In my experience, people usually know something about a picture, but they don't know they know it until you ask the...
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Why I Love Old Photos (And You Should, Too!)
Happy New Year! Collection of the author, 1898.It's that time of year for resolutions. If you feel you need to make one, here's an easy one that's simple to keep—but very important: Take care of your photos. Investing in a few of the right kind of storage...
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A Year of Passionate Photo Detecting: What Did You Miss?
On this Photo Detective blog, 2016 was a year of early color (and colorized) photos, photo-ID tips and crowd-sourcing. If you missed the most-popular posts, don't worry. The links in this 2016 wrap-up will take you them. Photo Identification TipsNewspapersWe started the year off right with a big...
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Colorized Old Photos Offer Rare Glimpses of Your Ancestors’ World
Recently a collection of colorized historical images of immigrants at Ellis Island went viral. It's a pretty snazzy group of pictures. And these images are historically accurate: The historians behind this project researched actual colors in use at the time. You can see the photos here. Somehow, the color makes...
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Clues in a Curious Old Family Photo: The First Mannequin Challenge?
It's not the first time a family photo begs the question "What were they thinking?" That's the case with this image of family sitting as though they're doing a mannequin challenge. The story behind this clowning for the camera has been lost, and the picture lacks identification. It was...
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Sharing is Caring When It Comes to Family Photos
This week's post is from Vanessa Wieland, online editor for Family Tree University, with gratitude and credit to Sandra Mingua Stephens for the photos and the inspiration. A week or so ago my mother’s friend, Sandy, posted some pictures on Facebook. The first was of she and my mom and...
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Clues in a 1900s Mystery Photo of the Old Family Farm
Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Planning a menu for that important family meal makes me think about how all that food ended up on my grandmother's table. There are no farmers in my family history, so I love to see reader's photos of rural life. Darlene Sampley...
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