If you’ve ever been told, “If there’s a nun in your family, figure out her order,” you’re not alone—and you’re probably also wondering how on earth to do that.

In a recent episode of The Photo Detective Podcast, I sat down with Sunny Morton to talk about her groundbreaking book, Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States. What started as a simple conversation turned into a deep dive into one of the most overlooked groups in family history: women who entered religious life.

The Mystery of the “Disappearing Woman”

As genealogists, we’ve all seen it.

A woman appears in childhood records—census entries, maybe a baptism—and then… she vanishes.

No marriage. No death record (at least not where you expect it). No trace.

One possibility? She became a nun.

As Sunny pointed out, these women often “disappear” from traditional family records because they step into an entirely different system—one with its own names, rules, and archives.

And unless you know where to look, they can remain hidden for generations.

My Own Surprise Discovery

Here’s the twist—even for me.

I didn’t think I had any nuns in my family.

But when I dug into newly available newspaper records, I found an obituary for my two-times great-grandmother—and there they were. Two daughters listed as “Sister,” each in a different religious order.

Two nuns. Completely unknown to me.

That’s the moment this topic went from interesting to essential.

Why Identifying the Order Matters

You can’t just search for “nun” and expect results.

Religious women belonged to specific communities—orders, congregations, convents—each with its own records. And those records can be incredibly rich:

• Personal files
• Correspondence
• Entrance records
• Sometimes even photographs

But first, you need to identify the order.

That’s where clues come in.

Clues in Records—and Photographs

Sunny shared one of the most important strategies: start with what you already have.

Obituaries are gold mines. They often list religious names and affiliations.
Census and vital records can help you match birth names to religious identities.
Newspapers may report vow ceremonies or community events.

And for those of us who work with images? Photographs can be key.

The clothing—the habit—is not just attire. It’s an identifier.

Archivists who work with these collections can often recognize an order just by looking at a photograph. As Sunny explained, they can look at an image and say, “That’s not one of ours”—or point you in the right direction.

That’s powerful.

The Archives You Didn’t Know Existed

Here’s something many researchers miss: most religious orders have archives.

These are not always open for walk-in research, but they are often accessible by email—and the archivists are remarkably helpful.

They want to connect people with their history.

And when you reach out clearly—explaining who you’re researching and why—you may receive detailed information you won’t find anywhere else.

A Bigger Story: Visibility and Impact

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was realizing just how significant these women were—and how often they’re overlooked.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, women religious:

• Built hospital systems
• Ran schools across the country
• Provided social services on a massive scale

At one point, they were responsible for a significant portion of healthcare in the United States.

And yet, in many family trees, they’re invisible.

What This Means for Your Research

If you have a “missing” woman in your family tree, consider this possibility.

Look for:

• Mentions of “Sister” in obituaries
• Gaps in records where a woman disappears
• Catholic family connections
• Newspaper references to convents or religious life

And don’t forget to look at your photographs with fresh eyes.

That unidentified woman in a habit? She may be the key to an entirely new branch of your research.

Final Thoughts

This episode reminded me of something I say all the time:

Every photograph—and every person—has a story.

Sometimes, that story just requires a different set of records to uncover.

Sunny Morton’s work gives us a roadmap to find those stories—and bring these remarkable women back into the family narrative where they belong.

About My Guest

Sunny Jane Morton is a genealogy educator whose expertise includes using U.S. religious denominational records for family history. She is author of the new book, Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States. She is co-author of How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, which received a book award from the National Genealogical Society (NGS). She is Editor of NGS Magazine; a Contributing Editor at Family Tree Magazine; and an Associate member of the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious.

Save on Sunny’s Books

• Save on both of Sunny’s books with coupon code Church26 at Genealogical.com
• Searching for Sisters
• How to Find Your Family History in US Church Records 

The post Finding Hidden Nuns in Your Family Tree: Researching Catholic Sisters with Sunny Morton appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

1. It Speeds Up Identification

Instead of manually reviewing thousands of images, facial recognition narrows your focus. It gathers every instance of a face in one place, making it easier to confirm identities and spot patterns.

2. It Helps You Reunite Scattered Collections

Many of us have photos spread across devices, hard drives, and platforms. Facial recognition connects images of the same person—even if they were taken years apart or stored in different folders.

3. It Provides Context Clues

Grouping photos by event or time period gives you visual evidence:

• Who appears together repeatedly
• What ages individuals appear to be
• Changes in clothing or location

These are the same clues you use when analyzing historical photographs.

4. It Supports Your Metadata Workflow

Facial recognition doesn’t replace metadata—it jumpstarts it.

Once a face is identified, you can:

• Add full names
• Tag relationships
• Include dates and locations

That information becomes searchable, portable, and usable across platforms (when the platform supports embedded metadata—always worth testing).

5. It Makes Sharing Meaningful

A labeled photo is a usable photo. When you share images with family, you’re not just sending pictures—you’re sharing identified people and stories.

6. It Reduces the “I’ll Do It Later” Problem

Let’s be honest—labeling our own lifetime photos often gets pushed aside. Facial recognition lowers the barrier so you can make progress quickly.

Want to Try It?

If you’re curious about how facial recognition can work in your own collection, I’m happy to walk you through it.

We can set up a quick 10-minute Zoom call and get you started with a free 2 GB Forever® account.

Because every unidentified face is a story waiting to be told—and this is one of the fastest ways to begin.

The post 6 Reasons to Use Facial Recognition in a Photo Organizer? appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

As the Photo Detective, I’ve handled hundreds of photo albums—everything from 1860s carte de visite collections to black paper albums of the 1910s, oversized Gilded Age volumes that resemble family Bibles, and yes, even those “sticky” magnetic albums with pages that did more harm than good.

At first glance, they may look wildly different. But they all share something important.

Someone created them with intention.

Every album is a curated story. A person—often a mother, sister, or devoted relative—selected images, arranged them, and decided what (and who) mattered. Some albums tell sweeping family stories across generations. Others capture a moment in time: friendships, courtships, school days, or even celebrity admiration.

And here’s something many people overlook: these albums are rarely just about family.

They’re about community.

Friends, neighbors, coworkers, and admired figures often appear alongside relatives. That’s where the real detective work begins. Identifying the people requires more than just recognizing faces. It takes context—family trees, local history, and what genealogists call the FAN network (friends, associates, and neighbors).

This isn’t something you can simply hand over to AI and expect instant answers.

Dating the photos is just the starting point. Understanding the story takes time, information, and patience.

I’ve seen albums passed down through generations of sisters—each one rearranging the images and adding her own layer to the narrative. I’ve worked with albums split apart, sold, and scattered—sometimes lost to auctions, sometimes recovered piece by piece. Each album comes with its own mystery… and its own surprises.

That’s what makes them so compelling.

If you have an album you can’t quite figure out, you’re not alone. And if your society or group is looking for a program on unraveling album stories, I bring real case studies—and a deep love of solving these visual puzzles.

After all, every album is a puzzle.

And yes—I do love a good jigsaw.

The post The Stories Hidden in Family Photo Albums appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

In honor of International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate a woman who never appeared in headlines and never sought attention—my Nana, my paternal grandmother. She lived what many might call an ordinary life. Yet to me, it was anything but ordinary. She is the only grandparent I truly remember. By the time I was born, both of my grandfathers were gone, and my maternal grandmother died when I was just a year old. Nana was my living link to the past.

Memory preserves her in small, vivid details. She called the living room the parlor, a word that felt like it belonged to another century. Every Sunday, the smell of pot roast filled the house. Her clam chowder was a family staple. She colored patiently, always in small, careful circles. A bright green parakeet named Birdie chirped in the background of her apartment. On summer days, we’d make lemonade together, rolling the lemons and oranges to squeeze the juice.

For seven years, my family lived downstairs from her in a three-tenement house my father owned. Her oldest daughter lived with her; sometimes her youngest son did too. She walked slowly in sturdy boots and wore her long hair pulled back in a hairnet well into her seventies. At Christmastime, she could look out her window and see the Tower in Jenks Park in Central Falls, Rhode Island—a landmark that anchored her to place and tradition.

But woven through those steady domestic rhythms was something quieter. She missed her family. She rarely spoke about her parents or her early life. My mother once remarked that Nana did not like her own mother. That silence should have told me something.

When I began looking for answers, the census offered clues. On the 1910 U.S. census for Pawtucket’s Fourth Ward, her mother, Sarah Jane Kelley, reported that she had given birth to nine children, but only five were still living. One of the children lost was from her mother’s disastrous, only days-long first marriage. Nana—born Eliza—entered the world in December of 1892. Earlier that same year, in February, her older brother James had died. For six years afterward, she was the only surviving child in the household. Suddenly, that childhood studio portrait takes on new meaning. There are no photographs of her siblings as young children, but why was she taken to a photographer, requiring a trip by public transportation? Perhaps she represented both hope and fragile survival in a family acquainted with loss.

The 1910 census also reveals her nickname—Liza—and that at seventeen she worked as a mill hand in a tag shop. The household was crowded: several of her mother’s siblings lived with them, four in addition to a cousin, making twelve people under one roof. That same year brought another blow. In December 1910, her father, Harry Wilson, died, leaving Sarah with four children under the age of twelve. Loss, responsibility, and crowded living conditions were part of Nana’s early landscape long before she became the woman I knew.

There was another tragedy she carried quietly. While babysitting her first grandson, he died of whooping cough. Grief visited her more than once.

A later photograph of her, printed on silk (shown above), shows a poised young woman. My father always said it was her wedding portrait. Not every early twentieth-century bride wore white; many married in their best dress, as she appears to have done. On September 30, 1912, she married James William Taylor at St. Paul’s Church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Together, they would have six children and build the family that eventually included me.

As a genealogist, I have learned that what isn’t said can be as powerful as what is recorded. Nana did not talk about her parents. She did not share stories of crowded rooms or early bereavement. Instead, she offered pot roast on Sundays, careful coloring in small circles, and the steady reassurance of presence.

Her life was not famous. It was not headline-making. But it was marked by resilience, quiet endurance, and the ability to keep going after loss. On this International Women’s Day, I honor women like my Nana—women whose strength was not loud, but lasting.

The post A Quiet Life, A Lasting Legacy: Remembering My Nana appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

The reverse of the image lists the photographer’s name, address, and image type. It was the name “Alden” that immediately caught my attention-not because he was a relative, but because I was already familiar with his Providence, Rhode Island studio in the Arcade, one of the nation’s earliest indoor shopping centers.

“Alden’s Pocket Portraits, 6 in Cases 25 cents, finished at time of sitting. Taken only at Alden’s 503 Washington St., corner of West, Boston.”

Augustus Ephraim Alden (1837–1914), who advertised as A. E. Alden or simply Alden, began his photographic career in western Massachusetts, working in the Northampton and Chicopee areas. During the Civil War, he produced portraits of soldiers and later capitalized on the booming market for celebrity images, including photographs of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Lincoln, and members of the president’s cabinet.

By the mid-1860s, Alden relocated to Providence, maintaining a studio on the third floor of the Arcade and advertising prominently on the building’s front stairs. Like many photographers of the period, he adapted his business to changing consumer tastes. After the war, Americans continued to collect photographs—not only of family members, but also of notable public figures.

Seeking greater opportunity, Alden moved to Boston in the 1870s. According to A Directory of Massachusetts Photographers 1839–1900 by Chris Steele and Ronald Polito (Picton Press, 1993), he operated studios at several addresses, including 503 Washington Street from 1877 to about 1880. The unidentified image of the man in uniform dates to that three-year period.

This narrow date range is key. The unidentified portrait of the man in uniform can be confidently dated to this three-year period. It coincides with Alden’s role as Eastern Agent for Applegate’s Pocket Portrait Machines in 1877, a technology that allowed photographers to produce multiple mechanically finished images quickly and inexpensively—often selling for as little as 6 for 25 cents. The photograph’s format and commercial context align more closely with the later period than with the Civil War era.

This example underscores that examining a single clue (the uniform) is insufficient. A photographer’s work history can add context for the image. If this was in a family collection, the clues of location and military service might be enough to give him a name.

The post Not Every Uniform is Civil War: How a Photographer’s Imprint Solved the Mystery appeared first on Maureen Taylor.