Customer Reviews

Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photographs

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is an outstanding way to expand your family history skills through photo research. It provides step-by-step advice on how to identify ancestors in photos using their poses, clothes, studio props, and other information.

After giving a history of photography with emphasis on identifying types of photographs by era, the author provides chapters such as "Looking for Clues", "Identifying Costume", and the very important "Identifying the Photographer". The book also gives detailed information on how to build your own family photograph collection including the use of photograph worksheets and proper labeling.

The photographs used to illustrate the book are simply glorious. It is a visual treat to follow the pictorial examples given to explain the text. Each photo is an exquisite specimen of how our ancestors faced the camera.

This book has great value to the genealogist. When confronted with unidentified photographs, we often despair of ever identifying the subjects. This book offers real assistance with this. Author Maureen Taylor offers detailed information on using clues in photographs themselves to identify their subjects. One example on pages 42-43 shows a street scene in Providence, Rhode Island. Since the photo contains telephone lines, research can place the image after 1881, the year telephone service was introduced there. The date can be even more precisely determined by other internal details of the photo. The book's appendices include a "Timeline of Photographic History" and an excellent bibliography of sources.

This is an excellent "textbook" for anyone who is getting into dating old photographs. Taylor gives very thorough and accurate information on photography processes and the types of photographs to be found in old collections.

The section on identifying costume is especially fine, although it is just a beginning for learning how to determine age by the clothing being worn. The worksheets provided at the end of the book are especially helpful.

All in all, if you are only going to buy one book on this subject, this is the book for you!

This book is a good start to identifying old photos - but it's not everything you'll need.

Pros: Taylor gives a great description of the history of photographs, covering methods of photography and types of photos. There are many example photos that cover a wide range of dates and styles. Sections of the book are devoted to helping to identify time periods and people, including charts that detail different 'costumes' by decade. There are even tips and forms included to get you started evaluating your own collection.

Cons: This book isn't everything you'll need. Taylor lists great resources to help you continue your research - but I was hoping to see this book as the resource, not as a list of resources. It is also limited in it's time span. Much of the information applies to the origins of photography up until around 1910. Although many people are more familiar with the styles of the 20th century, it would be nice to see this time period covered in depth as well - at least up to the 1950s or so.

Overall, this book is a good start, but don't expect to be able to use just this book to date and identify all of your photos. As Taylor states in the book, identifying photos is not a quick and easy process and will require multiple resources - including this one.

Why can't she provide the approximate dates for the photos presented in this book? Overall, this book is a good introduction to the subject. However, if an unknown person in one of your photos is wearing a dress nearly identical to one shown in the book, you'll still have to try to date it yourself. Obviously, many things need to be considered when dating photos (clothing, hairstyle, age of the subject, etc), but just as a reference, it would be nice to know when a photo was taken. This book gives an overview of the different photographic media (tintypes, carte de viste, etc) as well as the types of photos you might have in your collection (weddings, military, etc). She gives a very brief description of changes in fashion over time, but this really isn't enough to date any particular photograph.

This was a very interesting and informative book that has practical guides to dating and identifying old photographs. The information was helpful for a class that I taught at a genealogy conference as well as for my personal use.

This is a great book filled w/ marvelous tips on identifying the year of the photos. Especially enjoyed the info on clothes & time periods & photography periods. Very succinct & helpful.

I very much like the family history books and feel if I can learn one new thing it was worth the purchase. The book is well put together and easy to understand. It makes me want to go out there and look some more for information on my ancestors!

I found this book to be an excellent resource in my quest to date and place old family photos. I have been researching family history and in the process have gotten many clues from old photos. This book is a great resorce to help interpret what a photo is telling you. I will keep this as a resource in my genealogy library.

This beautifully designed; well illustrated book provides good advice for researching unidentified family photographs from Daguerreotypes to more recent times. The advice includes how to place the people in your family history and the case studies with their photographs including with each chapter are particularly valuable in that process. I primarily bought the book for tips on dating photographs and Taylor provides good background material, and links to more detailed information. There are some useful common sense tips such as looking at included flags, presidential photos, or whether power lines are included. I would have liked more here, for example when looking at fashions there are just 5 pages for both men and women from 1840-1900 (the only period covered). One deficiency was just one paragraph mentioning real photo postcards .. where the paper they are printed on can included valuable identifying marks to date within a few years.