At this time of year, I’m busy making lists of ingredients for Thanksgiving but I’m also starting to think about the holiday season. I have a few gift suggestions for the family historians on your list. Some fit in a Christmas stocking, others are online. You might want to drop a few hints to the gift-givers you know. 
 

At the end of the podcast, I have an offer for those of you that have been putting off learning photo-identification techniques. Here in the northeast winter is coming, and I’ll find those snowy days a good time to work on my photo projects, maybe you will too.

Related Episodes:

Episode 19: GenerationStory app

Episode 23: Memory Web for Your Desktop

Links:

• Save $30. on Photo Identification courses with the code Holiday19 Sign up HERE
• Save 30% on MemoryWeb.
• Try Vivid-Pix for Free or purchase it. 
• Shotbox 
• Sign up for mynewsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Pageso 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 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 andThe 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

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

November  is National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo Have you ever thought about writing your family history? Well...now might be the time to start. 
 

My guest is an author who weaves fiction and non-fiction together into historical fiction. Real people live in her pages with a fictionalized context. Her stories are compelling reading.

At our first meeting at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, she said she loved my Last Muster books of images of folks who lived during the American Revolution. I laughed looked at her and at almost the same time, we asked, Don’t you think that Eliza Hamilton would have had a picture taken? We agreed it was possible. Her book I, Eliza Hamiltonand her new book, The Secret Wife of Aaron Burrtake readers into the lives of these women.

Susan shared her story writing history, how she picks the topics of her book and what she’s working on next.

Related Episodes:

Episode 22: A Murder Mystery with Paul Collins, The Literary Detective

Links:

• Susan Holloway Scott's website
• NaNoWriMo Resources
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation
• Sign up for mynewsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Pageso 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.

About My Guest:

Susan Holloway Scott is the author of over fifty historical novels and novellas written under several pen names. Her bestselling books have received numerous awards and honors, and with more than three million copies of her books in print, she has been published in nineteen foreign countries around the world. Susan is a graduate of Brown University, and lives with her family in a book-filled house outside of Philadelphia, PA.

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 andThe 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

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

If you’ve ever seen a piece of jewelry with hair in it, you’ve probably wondered what’s that about?  While we associate hair jewelry with mourning, that’s not the whole story. My guest Sarah Nehama shared fascinating facts about mourning and memorial jewelry. A piece with her first name on it inspired her to start collecting these antiques. As a jewelry designerthese historical pieces influence the work she creates today. 
 

I hope you’ll be able to join me for my virtual Master Class: Dead or Alive: Mourning Memorials,  Spirit Photos and the Un-Dead.There are a limited number of spots so secure your ticket at MaureenTaylor.com.  Don’t worry if you can’t watch it live, you’ll have a week to view it. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 21: The Gravestone Girls

Links:

• Sarah Nehama's website 
• Sign up for mynewsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Pageso 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:

Sarah Nehama has a degree in art history from Boston University and has been designing and creating one-of-a-kind precious metals jewelry for over 25 years. Her studio is in the Providence, RI area. Sarah has also been collecting antique mourning and sentimental jewelry since 2005, has co-curated an exhibit in Boston, MA of mourning jewelry and art, and authored a book on the subject. She enjoys sharing her knowlege through public lecture presentations and webinars.

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 andThe 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 Maureent

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

My mom gave me all the family photos. The earliest photo on my dad’s side dates to 1895. On her side, a cousin connected with me images from that time frame as well. All the pictures came from relatives. Now imagine a serendipitous family photo find. One that you didn’t expect. That’s what happened to me on an ordinary day no searching required. 
 

Photo historian William Darrah in his book Cartes de Visite mentioned that that every Civil War soldier was photographed. That statement isn’t as odd as it appears. There were approximately 3,000 photographers working during the war. Many of those soldiers visited studios to send home an image of themselves. Some posed before they left home. Mathew Brady’s photographers and many other photographers traveled with the troops.

Do you have a photo of your Civil War ancestor? Until last week, I didn’t. A number of people wrote and asked if I could talk more about finding Civil War photos. Let me know if you locate the images you’re seeking.

Don’t forget to download the pdf that goes with this episode.

Related Episodes:

Episode 24: Civil War Photo Sleuth

Episode 32: The Man Behind Dead Fred

Links:

• Links mentioned in this episode
• Sign up for mynewsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Pageso 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 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 andThe 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 Smit

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

Vivid-pix Restore has a new tool for users. You can attach metatag to your images.

If you haven’t tried Vivid-Pix Restore, you’re missing the Vivid-pix fix. Basically you select an image to add it to the program and in seconds you see nine versions of your image. Pick the fix that seems right to you and save it. Your original will stay as it is, but you’ll also have the restored version as well. Try it and see. Use vivid-pix.com/pd and try it for free. You can Improve the quality of your scanned pictures and documents.

Metadata has a scary sound to it. It’s not quite as technical as you might think. Remember old fashioned library card catalogs? Where you could find what you wanted by looking things up by author, title, or subject. I think of metdata that way. You can enter names, places, or subjects all to help you locate what you’re looking for in your image file collection.

I’ll let my guest explain how all this works. We have an announcement while on the call Rick and I cooked up a challenge. Here’s how it goes. The Vivid PixFix Challenge. I set up a Facebook post and encourage people to add theirbefore and after images. The one with the most likes wins a photo album from Vivid-pix.

We’re celebrating Family History month with a give-away You’ll have until October 20th 11:59 to vote.

Related Episodes:

• Episode 25: A Vivid-pix Redux
• Episode 37: What's New with Vivid-Pix Restore

Links:

• Sign up for mynewsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Pageso 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:

With a few decades of doer and executive experience with Kodak and HP, Rick Voight and Randy Fredlund co-founded Vivid-Pix. Vivid-Pix designs, creates and delivers Fast, Easy and Affordable photo and document improvement software. Since launching in 2012, Vivid-Pix has advanced its product to earn the support of family historians, genealogists, photographers, and business leaders in over 100 countries. Bio.

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 andThe Toda

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

I have thousands of pictures on my desktop, my phone, and online. Finding exactly the right image to share with relatives was a nightmare. It could take days to scroll through all the pictures for just the right one. Then Christopher Desmond introduced me to MemoryWeb.  I remember thinking how can one product do so much AND be designed for genealogists. 

MemoryWeb is one of my go- to tools. It’s a photo organizer that’s easy to use and that makes sharing/ collaborating a snap.  Seriously. I can sync accounts automatically, share albums with relatives (who don’t have the product). Plus all the information I’ve added to the pictures stays with the pictures.  That means I can export my photos from MW with location, date, names, and captions without losing a thing. 

A big thanks to Christopher and Nancy Desmond for being a sponsor of the The Photo Detective Podcast.  They’ve created a photo tool that I love (and I don’t say that about every new product on the market.)

In this episode, Christopher and I talk about organizing digital photos and how you can do that with MemoryWeb.  He has a special offer for listeners. 

Episode 23: Memory Web for Your Desktop https://maureentaylor.com/episode-23-memoryweb-for-your-desktop/

Episode 15: Memory Web: The Photo Organizer for Genealogists

• Special Offer link: memoryweb.me/PD30
• Unlock the Shoebox 1 -- DIGITIZING YOUR PHOTOS
• Unlock the Shoebox 2 -- ORGANIZING YOUR PHOTOS
• 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.

Christopher Desmond is an entrepreneur with a background in global business economics.  His keen interest in family history and photography inspired him to co-found MemoryWeb, a photo organizer built for genealogists.  Chris loves helping family historians harness the power of metadata so the story behind their stories will stay intact for all the generations to come.   An award-winning presenter, Chris has spoken at a wide

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

You’re going to love my guest, Don Perry of the very successful new show on PBS, Family Pictures USA. It’s about people, places, photographs and the stories that connect them. Family Pictures USA travels across America showing us the connection between family photographs and family stories.

• 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.

Don Perry is the Executive Producer of the show and is a creative partner with award-winning filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris. Don has been nominated for an Emmy and a Peabody award. He won an NAACP Image Award for a Documentary Film, for Through A Lens Darkly that focused on African American photographers.

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

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

As I watch the destruction caused by Hurricane Dorian, I’m worried about the next disaster.  My mind is thinking about When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States in 2012. It was not the powerhouse storm that Dorian is, but  the effects were felt all the way into New England. On the New Jersey shore near Union Beach, family photographs started washing up on the beach. One woman took action and tried to rescue as many as possible  partnering with the public library, enlisting the aid of conservation professionals and relying on volunteer time and donations of scanners and other supplies. I reached out to see what I could do. The amazing thing about that project was that Jeannette was able to reunite many photographs with family, but there were also a large number that went unclaimed. 

I’m not sure that having a disaster plan could help a community literally blown and washed away by a storm, but museums, libraries and archives have them. By taking steps we know what to do afterward and we’ll have the resources we’ll need.   

This special podcast focuses on Disaster preparedness for a family archive. 

Download my free Disaster Preparedness Checklist.

• American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
• Operation Photo Rescue
• 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.

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

In the early twentieth century child laborers worked in mills across America. Perhaps your ancestors did too. It’s possible. In 1900 more than 1.75 million children aged 10 to 15 were employed. A photo of your ancestor might exist. I'm a big fan of this week's guest, Joe Manning. He finds the photos and connects them with family.

 In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired a photographer named Lewis Hine.  He spent more than a decade photographing child workers from New York to the Carolinas to Pittsburgh. He documented the horrific work conditions in which our ancestors labored. The NCLC was trying to end child labor using the images to raise awareness of the issue. 

Many of Lewis Hines photographs are at LIbrary of Congress. You can search them for free using the link in the show notes. If you had an ancestor who worked as a child, they might be depicted in a photo taken by Hine. In many cases the descriptions and captions that accompany these images are incomplete or don’t exist at all. 

That doesn’t deter my guest from piecing together the story and reuniting the past with the present. He’s on a mission to identify the children and reunite their descendants with these images. Joe Manning is an amazing photo investigator, but Every so often he asks for my opinion. You can follow his successes on his website, Mornings on Maple Street.com 

About My Guest: For the past thirteen years, Joe Manning has been identifying some of the more than 5,000 child laborers that were photographed in the early 1900s by Lewis Hine, and then tracking down and interviewing their descendants. So far, he has been successful at telling the stories of more than 300 children.

Manning is an author, historian, freelance journalist, poet, and songwriter. He has published two books about the history of North Adams, Massachusetts, and a book of his poetry. A social worker for 30 years, he retired in 1999 to devote his time to his writing career. His Lewis Hine Project has been featured on CBS Evening News and National Public Radio. Manning lives in Florence, Massachusetts. His work can be seen at www.MorningsOnMapleStreet.com

Related Episodes:

Episode 48: Finding Photographs of Your Ancestors

• Mornings on Maple Street
• Search for photos on the [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/photos/) site.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos at https://www.facebook.com/MaureenPhotoDetective/.
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• 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:

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show

In August, I dedicated all my podcast episodes to family reunion focused activities and guests. Since it’s Family Reunion season, that means we’re pretty likely to be posing for a group portrait. It’s part of most reunions...a visual gathering of everyone at the event. We have dozens of pictures of my husband’s family reunion attendees

In Episode 51, Edith Wagner of Reunions magazine shared a story about a reunion photo where they use flat bed trucks to help with the layout. A recent news story shared the tale of one reunion of 60 people who were going to reenact a family reunion photo from the 1890s.

Perhaps you’re part of a reunion gathering for everyone of a particular surname. Perhaps it’s an event that’s taken place for decades if not a century and there are group portraits of those.

I bet very few of them contain the names of the people in the image. There is a simple reason. If you know the names of everyone in the picture, you’re less likely to write identifications on them. The problem with that reasoning is that as time passes, so do the people who knew who was in the photo. Now the next generation has a photo mystery to solve. But how?

That’s where I come in. As the photo detective I’ve developed methods to solving photo mysteries of all sizes from a picture of a single person to one that contains dozens. I love working with you to solve your photo puzzles. Did you know that every photo collection is unique. They are. I should know I look at thousands of images every year.

I’m going to share 5 tips so you can get started.

Start with the most recent photo. It’s a lot like the standard genealogy advice to begin with the present and work backwards. While looking at the photos, you’ll be time traveling in reverse. You’ll be watching people get younger instead of older. Try to match up the faces in these images.

Bring all these big group portraits with you on your phone or tablet AND have an oversize copy made of the image for note taking.

What you’re looking for are two things that anchor the pictures in a time frame. Who’s the oldest person in the photo? Who’s the youngest? Those two people can date a picture. They help identify the time frame and in some cases the specific year.

Where are they standing? I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to stand near my husband and children in the group portraits. Study the image and look for clusters. There are a lot of different cluster combinations in group portraits. All the older siblings in the center is one option. All the children in the front row is common too. But after that people with strong relationships tend to stand near each other. At this point think about all the family stories you’ve heard about who in the family had close ties. They are likely to be close together.

No doubt about it, you’re going to need to know how old everyone in your family was at a particular point in time. And I mean everyone….cousins and spouses as well as children.

Have you charted your family history? Spreadsheet. If you have known photos of those people you’ll add one or two to the spreadsheet and definitely id them in your photo organizing program.

I’m working on a descendancy chart for my husband’s next reunion. I collected information by me

I'm thrilled to be offering something new. Photo investigations. These collaborative one-on-one sessions. Look at your family photos then you and I meet to discuss your mystery images. And find out how each clue and hint might contribute to your family history. Find out more by going to maureentaylor.com and clicking on family photo investigations. 

Support the show