More on investigating pictures.

Pictures truely can tell a story. I started out with a photo of eight women and their first names. I even had the location and date, so how much more could investigating this picture tell me? The answer is plenty. I realized that I had 2 more pictures taken the same day. They had been labled so I was able to tell who's house was in the background. As I studied to put last names on the eight ladies I realized it was a mother/daughter picture. My eight great Aunts and their daughters. Looking at another one of the pictures taken on that day, my parents, my brother and myself (as a baby) were in it. Then I knew the context of the picture. Six months before the picture had been taken,  my father had been diagnosed with cancer. He had sent his family to live with his mother until he finished treatment. This was his homecoming and he took time out to travel north to visit his mothers sisters. They took time out to gather in one place to greet him and wish him well.

I don't know about you but sometimes I give up investigating something and move on to something else when I'm not having very good luck. That is good in some cases as when you go back to your subject you see it from a fresh angle and may be able to discover something that was hidden before. Sometimes though, it pays off to keep hitting at it.

I've been trying to date a group picture of 16 young ladies with my great great Aunt in it. Each lady was numbered and on the back a name corresponded with the number. I wasn't sure, where it was  taken or anything else about it. I didn't even know she was in the picture til I scanned it in, enlarged it and saw on the backside she had Yours Truly listed as #16.  Also written on front were the initials CTC and a partial date of 19 and then the picture was cropped. :(

Since her family moved from Chicago to Detroit sometime between 1910 and 1920 it was a toss up as to what city it was taken in. I've spent 2 weeks looking at old buildings mainly chuches and schools of both areas. I was just ready to say I learned all I could (which wasn't much) when I tried one more thing. I found a picture of a building that matched the building in my picture on the American Memory website.. It was the Chicago Teaching College. I even found that Chicago had put in a short mass transit line from her old neighborhood to the college shortly before I estimate the picture was taken. So I discovered what city the picture was taken and that she attended a teaching college.It was well worth the time spent. :)

Here is the link to the American Memory website:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

 

One place to pick up some good information about ancestors are from books online. Heritage Quest has hundreds of books that are searchable by surname and placename. Libraries are your best source for this data base and it is usually free for the library patrons. There is also the Making of America online data base from Cornell University. It has local history books and books and journals about the Civil War. Michigan has a Making of America for the state of Michigan as well. If any one knows of other states or Universities have the Making of America online data base, please let me know.

Here are the links for these two sites:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/index.html

 

Here is one of the photo's I've uploaded

Lately, I've been uploading old photo's to cyberspace. I'm doing this so I can have back up in case a disaster destroys my old photo's or a computer crash happens and I loose all that are saved to my hard drive. Both these things have happened to me before so I'm real happy that I will have a record somewhere and won't lose them completely. I like Yahoo because I have my blog and genealogy site with them and I also belong to genealogy lists so it keeps everything organized. Also Yahoo isn't likely to go out of business overnight and not give you a chance to upload the photo's somewhere else.