Notes of Life

We have a couple of boxes of old family photos. We don’t know who some of the people are in the photos, but others provide small windows in to the lives of ancestors.

The photo on the right is one I scanned in on Sunday afternoon. It shows my Great Grandparents stood outside their home on the Shropshire/Cheshire border. It helps show how my Grandparents lived. Unfortunately, I’ve been told that the house has long gone so I can’t see what it looks like today. However, the cottage they moved into in their later years still stands and looks a lot like it did back in their day.

The photo needed a bit of a tidy-up. It was under-exposed and torn around the edges. So I cropped it down and use a couple of different adjustments (in Photoshop CS3) including Brightness/Contrast and Exposure.

Other items I scanned on Sunday included a couple of family wedding photos, my Great Great Grandmother Mary Jane’s obituary and a wedding notice for a Great Great Aunt.

I really need to set aside more time to sit and scan more photos. Something which might help with this is the Spring Break Scan-a-Thon (29th March - 6th April) and the next Scanfest on 30th March (as mentioned by Miriam at Ancestories). I think I should mark those dates in my diary and maybe I’ll get through some of those photos.

This evening I’m trying to date a family photography. Sadly, the photo isn’t in great condition; it’s overexposed and scratched. It’s also warped slightly, so I had to take a photo of it rather than use the scanner. The photo is sepia and is mounted onto thick card. I turned it into greyscale and fiddled about with a few settings to try and get a bit more detail.

Is this a wedding photo? The male members of the family are wearing flowers. Alfred & Mary (the couple sat down) were married on October 1897, so that is certainly the earliest date for the photo. I’m confident that the people standing behind Alfred & Mary are Alfred’s children (Mary was Alfred’s second wife).

Alfred’s children from his first marriage were Margaret (born 1871), Mary (1873), Thomas (1875), Henry (1877), Martha (1882), Francis (1884), Maud (1886), May (1889) and Mabel (1893).

At the time of their marriage Mary had one daugher, Sarah (born 1895).

Once married, Alfred & Mary had 2 more children, John (born 1898) and Muriel (1903).

I am sure the 2 men stood are Henry and Thomas. I don’t think Francis was in the photo as he ended his short life in an asylum. If the photo is Alfred & Mary’s wedding photo then one of the infants would almost certainly have been Mary’s daughter Sarah. Dad thinks the 3rd woman on the left is Alfred’s daughter Mary.

I believe the photo was taken in Alfred & Mary’s garden as we have a couple of other photos situated in the same place.