Last Saturday at our family history group morning
session, Jenny Joyce showed us how to use the new Familysearch website.
Recent changes have made it easy to narrow
down the search to only look at relevant records by narrowing down the search
by country and then narrowing down the results to only the collection you are
interested in.
We also looked at how to Browse the
collections, and looked at some of the collections that are only available as
images, not as the result of an indexed search.
Group leader, Jo Harris then showed us a few
other websites, like Papers Past, which allows searches of historic newspapers
from New Zealand, and an English site about primitive Methodists.
In the afternoon session, Jenny gave a talk about how
to date photographs. She started out by discussing the main types of
photographs that have been used since the first photo studios opened in England
and Australia in 1841, and their distinguishing characteristics. The types
discussed were daguerreotypes, calotypes, ambrotypes, tin types, carte de
visites, cabinet prints, platinotypes and postcard photos.
Several members of the group had brought
photos, which Jenny did her best to help date. One of the photos we were
lucky to see was an ambrotype, something that not everyone has in their
collection.
When Jenny couldn't provide a date for a photo
(like one that was shown of people in swimming costumes, and another of a
vintage car) she pointed out what aspects of the photo could be investigated to
help narrow down the date.
A key message that came out of the talk was
the need to take the mount of a photograph (if there is one) into account when
dating photos.
We were reminded that if we scan photos, we
should make sure to include the mount, including the corners of the mount as
these are also dating clues.
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