This period is very common in film adaptations and art. We see it often in Sherlock Holmes stories, portrayals of Edison and Tesla, or French-based tales of the belle epoque. Further west, this period is also the time of famous outlaws and sharpshooters like Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, and Annie Oakley. Maybe these characters helped inspire your family’s fashion?
We’re continuing our series on identifying clothing! Last week, we looked at identifying styles from the 1840s-50s. Now, we’re looking at the 1860s-70s: a period marked by the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.
MyCanvas has created this blog series to help those trying to identify old photographs! Our first stop is the early decades of photography.
Finding your ancestors’ photos can be a challenge to discovering who your long-ago relatives really were! Here are our tips for finding those photos.
You should always keep your photo negatives, of course. But is there more to do with them besides simply storing them? Here’s how you can turn your photo negatives into useful tools for family history.
Not all of our ancestors were diligent about labeling their photographs. And sometimes, we have to face the difficult task of deciding and deducing who that is next to our great-grandma. But identifying unknown family members in your photos doesn’t have to be such a chore. It may not be the easiest job, but putting in the time can be highly rewarding!
Photos and documents cluttering your genealogy work space? We’ll show you how you can preserve–and even repair–your old photos to keep your memories around for future generations.
I first learned to take a closer look at old photographs not with those in my family’s own collection, but by studying a forgotten photograph album picked up at an antique store. The photographs within this album dated to the Civil War, and in an effort to identify the individuals based on a few faded captions, I studied them carefully. Who were the women wearing stunning, full-skirted dresses? Who were the children with the solemn faces and neatly curled hair? Might the portraits of bewhiskered men have been a last memento before they left home for battle?
A lot of family photos today are digitital. Information such as the day, place, and individual can be easy to record on iphones, with Facebook, or during the download process. However, the same cannot be said for the old, tarnished photographs…
Today almost all of the photos we take are digital. Rarely do we think back to when cameras were taken to the local drug store to be converted into photo prints with an accompanying bag of photo negatives. With old photos though, those photo negatives are surprisingly important.