Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs

by Maureen A. Taylor

Book Overview

In this visually stunning book of historic family photographs, renowned family history researcher and photography expert Maureen A. Taylor shows you how to cherish old photographs and what clues they... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558705279
• ISBN13: 9781558705272
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Betterway Books
• Length: 145 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Great tool

It 's very informative book.

Great resource

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.

The Best for Photograph Dating

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!

Great Book

This book helped immensely in trying to identify individuals. I was able to date the photograph and put a name to a face.

A real help to genealogists!

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.

A beautiful and useful book

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.