Old Photographs

Discovering Old Photos

While researching your family history you will likely come across old photos that relate to your family tree. If you are lucky these will be old photographs of your ancestors. You may even discover a relative has a few old photo albums passed down through the generations. It is exciting when you discover these treasures. They give much more context to your family history than just historical records alone.

Handling Old Photos

Early photographs can be fragile so care needs to be taken when handling them If you discover old images of your family it is likely they have been placed in a photo album. This can be a double edged sword however. While photo albums may protect them from light and other things that can degrade them, you may find that they have been fixed in such a way to make them difficult to remove.

I would certainly suggest that you are not tempted to try and unstick any photos from an album. At least, not before digitising them. If you can remove them from the photo album I would only do so if you either want to check the reverse or scan the photos onto your computer.  Try not to disturb the old pictures unless necessary.

If you discover any annotation on the back of the photo then it is important to record that information. Likewise, if there is a description of the photo written adjacent to it in the album itself, then you should record that information as well. 

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