Many family historians have a collection of unidentified old family photos they’re not sure what to do with–but can’t bear to throw out. In this article, we’ll share tips for helping you accurately date old family photos.
Photographs are one of the treasures of genealogy. There is something about being able to look an ancestor in the eye—we make a connection to the people we can identify by both name and face. We search for traces of ourselves in their faces. We wonder what they were thinking or doing, or why that photograph was taken on that particular day.
But photographs can be perilous. Sometimes the people in the photograph are not who we think they are.
A few years ago, a photograph circulated around the internet and on a variety of online family trees, purporting to be an image of a young William Cheek, a Revolutionary War soldier who died in 1845. It turned up on dozens of websites and family trees. But there were two problems with that photograph. First, a quick search reveals the first photographic image of any person was made in 1830, making it impossible for the photograph to be of a young man who was born in 1752. The second problem with the photograph was that it was taken in 2012 and was stolen from the photographer’s website and inaccurately identified as William Cheek.
Additional story at: https://www.legacytree.com/blog/date-old-family-photos
