Photo Detective -old photo research

1. Don’t Leave Your Descendants Guessing: How to Caption Family Photos

   Sometimes captions on the back of photographs leave us wondering what the writer was thinking. The handwritten note on the back of this card photograph tells us just enough to be frustrating. The writer assumed that anyone reading it would already know the missing details—the name of the family reunion and the identity of the […]

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2. Digitization Options: Ancestry.com, Forever.com and DIY

   A new service caught my eye at RootsTech. Ancestry now offers a mail-in digitization service for photographs, slides, negatives, video, and audio. I stopped by their booth to ask questions about how it works, what it costs, and what genealogists should know before sending their family treasures through the mail. The answers raised some interesting […]

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3. A Quiet Life, A Lasting Legacy: Remembering My Nana

   In honor of International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate a woman who never appeared in headlines and never sought attention—my Nana, my paternal grandmother. She lived what many might call an ordinary life. Yet to me, it was anything but ordinary. She is the only grandparent I truly remember. By the time I was […]

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4. The Story in the Details: Wedding Notice Reveals

   On Friday, July 7, 1905, the Globe Gossip column of the Fall River Globe carried a single wedding notice for a June 28th event. In a city filled with mill workers, immigrants, and factory whistles, one marriage was deemed worthy of prominent placement. It conveyed more than the date and location of a ceremony—it revealed […]

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5. Not Every Uniform is Civil War: How a Photographer’s Imprint Solved the Mystery

   Look at this photograph quickly, and you might assume it dates to the Civil War. It doesn’t. Dating an image often relies on a combination of clues-the who, what, when, and where-but occasionally a single piece of evidence is enough to establish a reliable timeframe. This photograph of a man in uniform is one such […]

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