Valentine’s Day isn’t just for the here and now—it’s a bridge to the past. Behind every name on your family tree, there lies a love story. This month, why not delve into the romantic history of your lineage? How did your grandparents meet? What love letters were exchanged under the watchful eye of a world at war? And what photos were exchanged as reminders of that love?

Take a moment to gather these love tales. Write them, record them, and honor the journeys of passion—and sometimes sorrow—that have woven the fabric of your family. If you’re seeking inspiration, ask your elders while you still can. Let the love stories of your ancestors be the heartbeat of your family’s history this February. Unfortunately, no one saved the story behind this photo of Charlie and Marnie, and it ended up in a photo sale. The lack of identifiers–place and surname–make reuniting with family challenging.  Don’t let this happen to your photos!

Start by recording your photo stories. 

• Use your smartphone’s built-in recorder. 
• Recording is now available in genealogy apps like MyHeritage.com and Ancestry.com. Both allow you to link the image and the recording. 
• Your photo organizer might offer recording capabilities such as FileShadow.com 
• Or use a stand-alone app like StoryGlory.com, which is available in the Apple app store.  Listen to their story on The Photo Detective podcast. 

The post Love Stories Etched in Time appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week on the podcast, Maureen is doing a solo episode! This episode is an intimate look at Maureen’s life and behind-the-scenes of how she became The Photo Detective. 

Additionally, Maureen details her journey over the past year as she’s updated her book Family Photo Detective, from getting the publishing rights to going through to update all links and book sources to how the republishing of the updated edition has helped her continue in the work she’s always set out to do: help families understand more about where they come from through photographs and images.

Family Photo Detective, the updated version for 2023, is available now at MaureenTaylor.com, right on the homepage. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 204: Many Shades of Blue: Cyanotypes  

Episode 195: Imperfect History with Curator Sarah Weatherwax 

Links:

• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo-related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 208: The Family Photo Detective appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

From stamps to envelopes and postcards, my guest’s collecting passions expanded when he bought a few cards at a sale and became fascinated by the postmarks (and messages). He’s an expert on postmarks and using them as a photo clue. We chat about the golden age of postcard printing and the bits of history a postcard can convey including a link to President Garfield’s assassination. Jim Mehrer tells some great stories relating to postcards–why they were sent and why we should definitely read the backs of old cards. I know he’s inspired me to take a second look at the ones in my collection.

Related Episodes:

Episode 139: Collecting Postcards for a Half-Century with Mark Routh

Episode 104: Clues in Group Portraits and Albums

Links:

• Postal-history.com
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Jim Mehrer is an Illinois native and lifelong resident. After graduating from Augustana College in Rock Island, he spent several years managing independent retail stores. 

In 1993, Jim combined his business management experience with his hobby interests and established Jim Mehrer’s Postal History. Since then, he has offered hundreds of thousands of items to collectors of postal history and postcards in his mail bid sales. Also, Jim offers related storage supplies and reference literature, including several titles that he has compiled and published. 
Information about Jim’s business and the products he offers is on his websites at www.postal-history.com and www.deltiology.com.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada.  She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 141: Postal History Stories of Selling and Collecting with Jim Mehrer appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

One time a reporter asked me to tell them how many photos I’ve seen in my career. I’m simply not able to estimate that number. As a picture person, I look at client images, ones for my collection, and then the ones I use for research purposes. Suffice to say I’ve looked at more images in my life than I can say. That means it’s a rare photo that makes me go, “What?!” Yet that’s exactly what I said when William Samland showed me two images.

Here’s the first one. It’s his great grandfather. It’s a lovely studio shot of a man in work clothes. Nothing unusual except for the way he wears his watch fob on his hips.

It was the next image that made me go hmm.

It appears that George (or his family) wanted a more formal image of him so they took the first picture to a studio and had them alter it. It’s now a crayon portrait and instead of work clothes George is wearing a suit. Perhaps he went to the same studio a second time, but there is something about this image that makes me think he didn’t. Look closely.

There are a couple of differences. The artist thinned George’s mustache. It’s not unusual to see artistic changes in a crayon sketch.

It’s the same exact pose, chair and background. So were they both created in the same time frame. It’s possible. Crayon portraits like this had stylistic differences depending on when they were made. If the first picture was taken in the 1890s then George would be in his thirties. The color tone of the photo and the background suggests that. The chair is out of the mid 1860s but studios often held on to props. There is no photographer listed on either image.

While this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a double like this, this set is particularly nice. Thank you to Bill Samland for letting me feature his image in this post.

Photo Consults

Do you have a photo you’d like to know more about? I’d love to help. Each consult comes with a recording. There are rates for one, three, or many images.

The post An Altered Reality: One Man. Two Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This faded color photo depicts my grandmother on her 75^th birthday. My mother, her daughter-in-law, made her a cake and threw her a small party. I was there. As soon as Gramma saw the cake, she started crying. It was her first birthday cake and party. It amazed us all.   As a child, I couldn’t believe that this elderly woman who I loved dearly had never had a cake or a party. Later I asked my mother why. She told me that my great-grandmother was really mean and took it out on my quiet sweet Nana. It was inconceivable to me for this woman to be unloved.

To this day, the reality of that moment sticks with me.  

I remember asking her about her family but she always dodged the questions by talking about my grandfather’s family. My mother’s statements made me want to know more. Why was her mother so mean? Why was she so uncared for?

It’s pictures and stories like this that spur an interest in family history. As the Photo Detective, you can’t have one without the other. Images are storytellers.

It seemed impossible to locate more information about her ancestors. My father never mentioned them. He hadn’t talked to her about them either. I’m still not sure why Gramma confided in my mother.

Years passed. Mom decided to help me search. A teen couldn’t go to an archive unaccompanied. What we discovered was a surprise to both of us. My great-grandmother had another marriage as a teen, a child who died and then she met my great grandfather. She was harsh with her daughters so they wouldn’t make her mistake. She’d said something like that to my mother once, but it was just a passing statement without context.

Memory Keepers

It’s not just pictures that act as memory prompts. Sometimes it’s ordinary things that a person used that trigger feelings.

When cleaning out my mother’s house, I discovered an old washboard in the basement. Suddenly memories of my grandmother came to my mind. My Dad must have saved his mother’s washboard. There is nothing special about this artifact. It has little monetary value, but I imagine that my Dad remembered his mother using it. I do too.

As a small child, I’d watch her take out a washtub, add soap and hot water, dunk clothes and rub them against the rippled glass surface. She’d repeat the process until all the clothes were washed. Then she wrung them out and hung them on the clothesline out her third-floor apartment window. It was something she used to do several times a week. No Laundromats or electric washing machine for her, she preferred to do her washing the way she’d been taught. By hand.

It’s funny the things you remember about a person. The everyday routines trump extraordinary feats every time. Her favorite things were sarsaparilla (a type of root beer) and her parakeet.

The pictures I own of her seem bland compared to her in person.

She’s a small child in one and in her sixties in the other. Her light blue eyes dominate the picture. She always wore her long hair up in a net. It was pure white but as long as it was when she was a girl.

An Old Fashioned Life

She was an old-fashioned woman. Born in 1892, she grew up in a world where women generally didn’t drive, cars were new fangled contraptions and many of the modern conveniences of telephones and television were not part of her childhood. For the most part, time stood still in that apartment. My father introduced her to contemporary conveniences often against her will.

• Her apartment had cold water (until my father insisted he install a hot water faucet).
• She heated bath water in big kettles on the stove and carried them to the tub like she’d done all her life.
• She cooked without benefit of cookbooks. There was no need. She knew her favorites by heart.
• To go from place to place she took the bus. She never owned a car or had a license. We took her on weekly drives to revisit places she’d lived. Our course directed by her.

My first conscious memories of her were of her as an older woman. She seemed ancient. Yet I’m almost the age she was then.

We lived on the second floor. She lived on the third with her eldest daughter Dot, and often her son Sam. My sister and I only had to run upstairs to visit.

Sometimes she babysat. Gramma let us play with old mill spindles wound with brightly colored silk thread, remnants from someone’s employment in a factory. We didn’t know whom. With some encouragement, we could get her to leave her “parlor” perch to sit in the kitchen and color. Her favorite coloring crayon was “yella.” I’m not sure of the source of her slight accent. Her family lived in America for generations with the exception of her grandmother Esther. She colored in a small circular pattern, something she learned as a child. No straight lines for her.

For hours every day, she’d sit by the window and look out on the street from her third-floor tenement apartment. When I asked her why she spent hours looking at nothing but an empty street, she said she was remembering all the people that were now gone. One of her daughters lived in Tennessee; another daughter and a son lived in California. Her husband died in 1953.

She rarely spoke unless asked a direct question. Quiet, formal and reserved. She rarely smiled. She wore high boots that buttoned and laced up much like she would have worn in her youth. She never left the house without a hat. She let me play with her hatpins from an earlier era.

Every birthday or holiday she gave my sister and I a card with a handkerchief inside. I still have them today.

A sudden stroke took us by surprise. She was 75, just months after that emotional birthday. At her funeral, we met her remaining family–two sisters and a brother. It was odd that she never saw them even though they all lived in the same town just a few minutes apart. They kept to their families and she to hers.

Her life was so different than ours. We saw my mother’s family all the time for trips to the movies, drop in dinners and just to chat. As an adult, I’ve come to understand that my grandmother was lonely. It wasn’t something that happened overnight. I’m still trying to pull all the facts of her life together to understand her past and by extension my own. As the family genealogist, I try to put together the story of ancestral lives. You can too. Understand this:

All families have secrets.

The few pictures I have of her don’t share those hidden bits, but the documentation reveals details of the timeless tales of young love, broken hearts and early death. There was so much sadness in her life and in her mother and father’s families that she couldn’t talk with a child about it all. Her family was broken through a series of circumstances that drew them apart rather than together. And so she sat and reminisced.

The Reckoning of the Past Continues

I recently met three of my grandmother’s nieces. The daughters of her older sister still live in town. They told me a story about my grandmother that seemed like they were talking about a different woman. According to the trio, she looked so much like her sister Jeanette that they’d play tricks on people and make them think they were the same person until caught red-handed together. Her nieces still laugh about those moments. The woman I knew rarely laughed.

She smiled sometimes. Gramma was like a little kid at an amusement park. No roller coasters for her. She loved the carousel. She’d ride over and over with us by her side, a slight smile on her face. While the amusement park we visited is long gone, the town retained the carousel. It’s still there waiting for new families to make memories.

Recognizing the Heroes

My grandmother, Eliza Jane Wilson, never talk about her early life and now I know why. Her mother, father, and grand-parents had lived through a series of tragedies. Her sadness wasn’t peculiar to her. It was generational.

The heroes in our families don’t have to be lifesavers but those with the courage to endure adversity.

• Her father died suddenly when she was 18. She hated her mother and jumped into marriage with my grandfather soon after.
• She had five children. She never worked outside the house enabling Gramma to live her life in the past.
• World War II changed her family. Three of her children sought opportunities elsewhere. She rarely saw them. My Dad was her caretaker.
• When babysitting her oldest grandchild, he died of whooping cough.
• She outlived her husband by fifteen years.

Questions Not Asked

It’s the unasked questions that haunt family historians, myself included. The extra minutes we could have spent chatting about daily activities and people our ancestors once knew.

For this woman the list of things I wished I’d asked is endless, but I’d start with the birthday cake and her love of the “dobby” horses.

Here’s what you can do today.

Take out your pictures, show them to family and see what memories pop into the conversation.

Don’t wait for the right moment or set an agenda.  There never will be the perfect time. Don’t procrastinate. Time’s a wasting. Just let the conversation flow from one picture to another. You may not get another chance.

The post Deciphering the Past One Family Hero at a Time appeared first on Maureen Taylor.