Those Nameless Ancestors

Old photographs provide an interesting gateway to the past, showing us the fashions, hairstyles, homes, workplaces and communities of yesteryear. My family never threw anything out, so I'm fortunate to have old albums and loose photos featuring my relatives and the places they lived. I'm even luckier to have most of them labeled so I know who and where they are with a rough idea of the date. 

As an example, here's a photo of 117 McGregor Avenue, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, identified by a relative at bottom. (It might have been neater to write on the rear but the photo can always be cropped if necessary.) I was aware that my great-grandparents, Robert and Fanny Moore, lived at this address in the Soo, but wouldn't have known this was the house if their granddaughter hadn't added the address sometime in the 1980s or 90s. Of course, nowadays you can also search an address on Google Street View, which I've done, so I know the house is still standing.

Incidentally, according to family tradition, this was the first house in the Soo to have indoor plumbing. Not surprising, since Robert was in the hardware business and would have stocked the supplies himself. 

Like many people, Robert and Fanny's daughter Helen (my grandmother) arranged photos in an album. The page below shows how she dated the pictures and identified some of the places. Her daughter added another caption in later years to identify Helen's sister, Kathleen, in the bottom centre photo.

"Doc Shepherd," by the way, appears to be a young lady in a fake beard. No doubt there's a story there, now lost.

From the other side of my family I have this nice picture of a lady posing in her backyard jungle:

The rear is labeled like this:

The original caption gives the date and address in Toronto. Years later, my other grandmother added the name of her mother-in-law, realizing that "Mother" might not be useful to everyone in years to come.

And that, of course, is the reason many older photos are unlabeled. At the time, everyone knew who the person in the picture was, so why bother identifying her? 

I work in a place where we have older photos and albums for sale. Sadly, many of the subjects are unnamed. We call them Instant Ancestors. You can make them yours if you want to. 

Here's a nice bespectacled young lady, photographed by Sanders, a studio in London, Ontario. Cooper and Sanders were in business from 1896 to 1909 at 403 Richmond Street. In later years, Edgar J. Sanders appears to have been in business on his own. That might help to date the photo, but doesn't ID the young woman.

Someone's cute toddler poses in the studio of W. Farmer, cor. King & McNab streets. The intersection suggests the photographer worked in Hamilton, Ontario at the intersection of King and what's now spelled MacNab. No one identified Junior. 

A dapper 19th-century gent, top hat in hand, phony arch and piano as backdrop. No identifying marks whatsoever, not even the photographer. 

Not sure what to do with old photos? Here are a few ideas:

• Want the photos but the album is in rough shape? Arrange them into fresh new scrapbooks, perhaps with added documents, captions and old letters for context. Pictures can be arranged chronologically, by person, or thematically eg. vacations, weddings. Make it a craft project. Kids might like to help and they'll learn about their family in the process. 
• Scan the photos into your computer so you can email them and post them online. But don't throw out the originals in case future generations have trouble accessing the format they're saved in. 
• Show off your ancestors on Ancestry or some other website. Or build your own. Long lost relatives may be delighted to find pictures they don't have themselves.
• Donate the album or photos to a local archives. Photos of your grandpa's store or grandma's Women's Institute branch might be a useful contribution to local history. 
• If you have really unusual subject material, do your homework before tossing out the pics. Not interested in your crazy uncle's albums of Great Lakes freighters? Someone into shipping history might like to have those. Your cousin took lots of photos of the drive-in theatre he worked at in the '50s? Someone out there might be researching that very thing.
• Frame some of the photos and display them in your home. Great conversation pieces.
• Make sure relatives know you have family photos. Even younger generations who think they aren't interested in long-ago dead people may catch the genealogy bug in later years. 
• Turn photos into gifts for hard-to-buy-for relatives. Pictures can be added to calendars, mugs, and T-shirts to make them more fun.

But most importantly, label your photos for future generations. If you're not sure who the people are, show them to your oldest relative. He or she will likely enjoy sharing what they know. I had my grandmother identify all the loose photos sitting in a box so I'd know who the people were.

Eventually, all of us will be no more than faces in old photographs. Let's keep our ancestors alive through their pictures, just as we hope future generations will remember us.