a c1900 photograph of a mother and her home and first five sons
Toronto. Every family seems to have a ‘keeper’ of records and a photographer who diligently records and photographs the minutiae of life as it is lived.
A few decades back, my parents answered a knock on their front door. A young woman introduced herself. She turned out to be married to a distant cousin of my father and was deeply into family history.
Invited in for ‘a cuppa’, she took out the photograph shown here and asked my parents if they knew who the people were – and when and where the photo was taken. My dad exclaimed that he knew. It was his mother and his first five brothers taken at their home around 1900. The photo was taken about a decade before he was even born!
We often think of Ancestry and its many databases and indicies allowing detailed research of family history in an organized fashion. That data is augmented to an astonishing degree by ‘word of mouth’ notes – and photographs. In fact, without photographs, we would be hard pressed to even know how our ancestors looked, how they lived, where they lived, etc.
We owe a deep debt of gratitude to amateur – and professional – photographers for taking family photographs. And to the many ‘pack rats’ who have kept the photos safe over the decades. Pictures go a long way to making information from data bases and notes come alive.
