Genealogist's Treasures
- Leslie Ryan
- Sep 11
- 2 min read
There are no better Genealogist's Treasures than a box of family photos, and I recently was gifted a big one! And the pictures are LABELED! There's the bigger miracle!
My parents divorced when I was very young and his family was on the other side of the country, so we had little to no contact with them.
My grandparents passed away before I was a genealogist and I never gave a thought to the treasures I was missing out on. Lucky for me, relatives going through a household in downsize recognized that the family genealogist would want these and got them to me.
Some of the photos were taken at restaurants or clubs and included the cardboard frames! I looked up this establishment on the internet and found a wide interior shot, showing that the bar and tables were surrounding the stage with two pianos and a harp! Pictured here are my great grandmother (the smiling one), one of her daughters, and her sister. Since GGM is wearing a big corsage, we can assume it was a birthday celebration!
But the biggest genealogist's treasure of all, was this tintype of my 2nd great grandfather in his Civil War uniform, and his wife! They are the parents of the two sisters above at Jack Valentine's Music Bar.
Did you know that tintypes were the Polaroids of their day? They were cheaper and could be processed faster than their predecessors Daguerreotypes and ambrotypes.
I've included some links below with more info about old photos and their storage and preservation.
If you should received a trove of genealogist's treasures and you know who the people are, write the names and dates on the backs in pencil, never ink!
MyHeritage has a fun photo enhancer to clean up images, and colorize them. They will also "animate" the photos, which, frankly, seems creepy. It will also attempt to date the images for you, but I have found that to be hit and miss sometimes. They were twenty years off on this one!
I am scanning the fronts and backs of all of these pictures, and have been busy updating my Ancestry tree with new profile pictures I never thought I would have!
When that is completed, I will begin preparing Christmas gifts of updated family histories and these photos for their other descendants.
What are you up to? If you'd like some help with your tree or gift ideas, send me an email at the address below. Free, no obligation reviews of what you have and advice if I have it!
Best regards,
Leslie Ryan
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More info about tintype photos:
