Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is an album from the early days of amateur photography, compiled in the 1890s. At first, I thought it was Edwardian, but the women sporting ‘lamb chop’ sleeves date it earlier. With this knowledge, other signs fell into place. Women’s fashion in a picture is often the best gateway to dating old photos. TheContinue reading “A World Beyond the Picture”

This set of photographs depicts the wedding day of a young couple from Aldridge in the West Midlands. The chemist E.V Davies, at 47 Birchills Street, Walsall, processed the photos in the mid-1960s. The official wedding photographer has not taken these images; in fact he appears in one of the shots. They have been takenContinue reading “The Big Day”

I recently received an album and it wasn’t what I was expecting. I had seen some pictures of its contents and assumed it was simply an unusual, promotional, branded photo album. I took it out of the envelope. It was a genuine antique — the cover was coloured deep sepia with age, dog-eared, cracked andContinue reading “Make Time for…Tobler Chokolado”

Among the many scenes that appear repeatedly in family albums are fully clothed people standing where the sea meets the shore: men with their trousers rolled up to the knee, women with their skirts hitched up, and children squinting, with or without their sunhats on. The waves rarely break much further up than their ankles,Continue reading “Whitsun Tides – A British Bond with the Sea”

When I was going through the loose photos in our archive recently, looking for stock for our new Ebay shop, I came across these two early Polaroids. They were taken with a Polaroid Land Camera 95, a series produced between 1948 and 1961. I pored over them, transfixed. When viewing any anonymous family photograph, IContinue reading “Two Polaroids”

At the end of 2019, to coincide with our launch exhibition Auto-Memento, we were excited to create and publish the first edition of Famzine, The Family Museum’s found photography zine. Issue 1 features contributions by American artist, writer and found photo collector Barbara Levine, British family historian Ben Haslam, Nigel and me. Barbara Levine isContinue reading “Out Now: Our Found Photography Zine”

When beginning to research family history, the most common place to start is family photographs. These may come in numbered volumes covering several generations and perhaps annotated, or maybe just a few loose negatives in a battered Lillywhites envelope. Dating old family photos is not always easy, even for those experienced in doing so; theirContinue reading “Back in the Day – Dating Family Photos”

During the TV coverage of the UK riots in 2011, I saw a woman being interviewed who had fled her home to escape being burned alive. She said: “I just grabbed my photo album and ran for the door.” For the past 30 years, I have been collecting family photographs and albums, which have grownContinue reading “Cherished Little Corners”