Picture Importance



David Jordan

Have you ever wondered where a baby get their features from? Recently, several of my friends have been having babies. Not having children of my own, I find myself looking at each newborn and marveling at how much alike, yet at the same time different they look from their parents. My best friend's mother immediately started looking at her grandson trying to identify what characteristics he had that were from her side of the family, when all I saw was a baby!

  



Karl Hagerstrand



Then someone presented me with a picture of a relative as a newborn and immediately I saw features that reminded me of my relatives. In fact in one picture I saw myself staring back at me as I gazed at a picture of my mother as a young girl. (I will save this picture for a future post).



Rebecca Laura Gibbons
Thomas Edge 



From the way we stand, to the smirks on our face, traits are passed down from family member to family member. The picture of the young boy in the nickers with a black cap on standing in the gate, reminds me of how my brother stands with his feet slightly apart. Yet the "young boy" died in 1918 somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean as his unit approached the shores of France.





William Gilbert Edge



As I began the task of scanning, labeling and saving all of the family photographs I could, I initially had to overcome the difference in clothing over the years. For instance, the second photograph on this page looks like a girl sitting in the chair; however, that is my grandfather, a second generation American born to a Swedish family in the middle of Ohio. His smile remained like the one in the picture up until his death in 1990. A smile that would light up the room.







Unknown- Jordan's side

My only regret is finding a photograph in which I do not know who the people are. I know they must be ancestors, but there is no way for me to know who the people actually are in the photograph. I envy people in Ancestry.com's weekly newsletter that have a picture and know for a fact that one of the people is their ancestors, yet they are wanting the others identified. Yet, I have a couple in which I know no one in the picture.





Unknown- Jordan's side



Pictures are a vital part to conducting family research. Not only do they bring the ancestors back to life, but they give researchers a way to identify characteristics that are often passed down, like my great-grandmother's bushy eye brows!

 

Good luck as you search for pictures of your long lost relative!  Don't be afraid to ask many relatives if they know who the people are in the pictures. You never know what you can discover.