Using photos to research your family history
Over60 community member, Di Rieger, 66, from Hoppers Crossing in Victoria, shares her tips on how to use photos to research your family history.
Family photos can be a simple but powerful tool to help tell a family story. I have used them to help me research my family history. Photographs add a human element to the names and dates that make up the foundation of family history. These personal reminders of loved ones and days gone by add life to a family history and help link the generations.
One of the most valuable aspects of using older photographs in your research is they may help you pinpoint family members at a specific place in time. For example, family gatherings have always been a time to take photographs. A family photograph taken in the mid-1800s may show a great-grandparent of the nuclear family of that time. You could then place in time that person to have been born in the mid-to-late 1700s and is a pearl of great price whenever found. For example, the above photo is one of my husband Michael's ancestors, the Appoo family. It is an excellent example of the clothing and furnishings of the period (mid to late 1800s). Such photographs may also help to confirm the death of certain individuals and the presence of others that had not been previously known to exist.
Photographs can also add a great deal of history to otherwise boring dates. If “a picture is worth a thousand words”, then a picture of a family standing in front of their old log cabin, surrounded by work tools and animals, wearing their daily dress, with a certain type of spectacle, corncob pipe, apron, or rocking chair will enhance the family history enormously.
In addition to the photographs that you take with your own camera, you may be able to find and get copies of photographs from other resources. Old photographs may lie hidden away in attics, closets, drawers, neighbours' homes, and in local histories, libraries, museums and archives. If you are looking for a photograph of a soldier in your family, you could search the Australian War Memorial's photographic collection that contains over 800,000 photographs, covering the experience of Australians at war and Australian military history from the 1860s to the present. You don't know what you'll find until you look.
In family history research, photography can be used for more than just showing what people looked like. For example, you may want to take a picture of an ancestor’s tombstone and include that photo with your documentation of the individual's death. When taking pictures such as these, it is important to note information such as the date and location. In the case of a tombstone, you would want to record the location of the cemetery, as well as the location of the tombstone in the cemetery. Many of the tombstone pictures I now have in my possession represent a unique record because the original tombstones have been replaced with newer ones, been lost to time, and in some cases the lettering has faded on the originals even though the photographs retain a vivid recollection of what was once there.
One of the most critical needs in almost all families is to properly identify photographs. After 40 years of faded memories, little Joy, age two, can look a lot like little Dianne, age two. When you identify photographs, take care not to destroy them in the process. Writing on the back of some photographs will damage them. Depending on the quality of the paper, a pencil, pen, or other means may be appropriate. I’d advise to make some or all of the following notations:
- Date of the photograph.
- Names of the individuals in the photograph, in the order in which they appear, recorded in such a way as to not confuse anyone at a later date.
- The ages of the individuals.
- The circumstances around which the picture was taken.
- Who took the photograph.
- If there is an original negative, where it is located.
- If the photograph is a copy of an original, where the original is located.