RLP 120: Identifying and Preserving Photographs with Maureen Taylor

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 120, Identifying and Preserving Photographs with Maureen Taylor. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go, Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with accredited genealogist, Diana Elder, and our guest, Maureen Taylor. Hi, Maureen

Maureen Taylor (58s):
Hey Nicole. Hi Diana.

Diana (1m 1s):
Hi Maureen. We’re so excited to have you on the show today. So thanks for being willing to come on and talk to us. So let me just give a tiny introduction, then we’re going to let you tell us more about yourself, but Maureen is known as the Photo Detective, and she has her own podcast. So you can go check that out on the Photo Detective. I believe you’ll tell us the correct title of that’s not it, but Maureen also does all sorts of presentations and is really the expert about how to identify those people who have no idea who they are in your photos. And we all have those. So pretty excited to get to talk to you today, Maureen, and just ask you all of my questions that I’ve been wondering about all through the years.

Maureen Taylor (1m 45s):
Well, I can’t wait Diana.

Diana (1m 48s):
Oh, okay. Well I hope you’re ready,

Nicole (1m 51s):
Maureen, can you tell us more about yourself and your podcast?

Maureen Taylor (1m 55s):
So I have a podcast called The Photo Detective. It’s makes it easy for everyone to remember me and the podcast. And on it, I interview people about, I’m mostly photo focused. So let’s see, what kind of guests have I had. This week’s guest is a woman from the Smithsonian talking about the Smithsonian lab and all the photographs that she’s cataloged during the COVID shutdown. I have sometimes historical authors like Susan Holloway Scott, who writes historical fiction based in the 18th century because I have a photo project called The Last Muster and I, I love Revolutionary War history.

Maureen Taylor (2m 37s):
Sometimes I have people talking about technical issues with photography, like the people from Vivid-Pix Restore, or Memory Web a digital photo organizer or The Dead Pixel Society, which is a group interested in sort of photo technology. So it really varies quite a bit who I have on the show. And then once a month I do a solo episode on something I’m interested in. It started as a Facebook live and then, well, to be frank, the cleaning my office, every time I wanted to do an episode was killing me, so I went to audio only and have never looked back.

Maureen Taylor (3m 17s):
I really love the audio format.

Nicole (3m 20s):
That’s fun. I love that. I think it’s a really great way to get the content out there and I love listening to podcasts. So I’m sure all the other people out there who are listening are kind of in that boat too. Thanks for telling us all about your, your awesome podcast.

Diana (3m 35s):
Thank you. Yes. And I just have to make comment on the Last Muster Project that you’re doing. I have listened to some of those episodes and heard you talk about that. And it is so neat. I just love hearing all about that project to discover these men that fought in the revolution so long ago, but we’re still finding things like what was the latest episode about there was a man discovered or a photo discovered just recently, right?

Maureen Taylor (4m 2s):
Yes. So at the Allen County Public Library, they have the Lincoln Collection and there was a picture of a man in there who had communicated with Lincoln, but it’s not just the men who served it’s their wives or their widows. And even some significant children. It’s a project I started, oh my goodness, way back in 2001. And it just keeps rolling. Every time I think I found all the images there’s more pictures that people dig out of their collection. Suddenly there are found in museums that they’re found everywhere. So usually April and July, I consider my Last Muster months, obviously 4th of July for the 4th of July, but April, because of April 19th and the beginning of the, you know, the fighting during the war.

Maureen Taylor (4m 52s):
So I find people to talk about it. One of my favorite people this year was a guy who talked about Revolutionary War tourism and how it was popular, even during the French and Indian War where we don’t think about our ancestors traveling around, right. But he did all of this original research. He’s a historian and discovered that people used to go and visit the battlefields, just to see where the battles were fought afterwards. And it’s kind of creepy some of the things that he told me about these battlefields, because they would bury like if it were the French and the English, right, fighting, and the French were killed on the battlefield, the English would bury their own, but the French bodies would still be there.

Diana (5m 38s):
Oh, my word.

Maureen Taylor (5m 39s):
Oh, my word.

Diana (5m 40s):
So many interesting things that we come across in researching. Isn’t that the truth? Oh my goodness. So I love what you do and love your work. And I think what’s most fascinating to me is that you have really come up with a way to identify people in the, and so I want you to talk to us and all of our listeners today about how you do this. So let’s say I have got a photograph and I actually have several and really have no idea who all the people are. There’s a couple that are real mysteries too. So what do we do first?

Maureen Taylor (6m 15s):
Yeah, it really depends on the photograph. So when someone sends me a picture or an album or, you know, whatever they have, I look at the picture and assess it in terms of what kind of clues are in the picture from the photographer, to the format, to what they’re wearing, and all the other little clues that might be there. So, because I look at a lot of pictures pretty much every day, I’m looking at pictures, my eyes, zero in on the unusual, the one thing that makes that photograph more unique than the one I looked at before. And that clue can actually help tell you a lot about the picture and can tell you more about the people as well.

Maureen Taylor (6m 58s):
So just last week I did some live consults for a webinar and it was fascinating to meet with people. They would submit their photographs and we picked some for this webinar. And then we did five and I would say three out of the five thought they absolutely knew who was in the picture. And it turned out they actually didn’t, that it was someone else. Once we looked at all the clues and looked at their family history and looked at sort of history too, because that plays into it, that we came up with a totally different way of looking at those photographs. And I give homework.

Diana (7m 34s):
That is so fun. I love that. They thought that they knew. How many times do we think that? We look at it and we go, oh, well, that’s great Uncle George to find that it’s not, oh, my word, that must have been exciting.

Maureen Taylor (7m 46s):
It was, I started the conversation with one woman by saying, are we feeling open-minded today?

Diana (7m 52s):
That’s really good because in our genealogy, we have to be open-minded. I mean, how many times do we think that someone was living somewhere? And then we find them in a totally different place. And I don’t know that we’re as open-minded with our photographs. So we would approach this first with an open mind and you start looking for clues. So what else can we do as we’re just getting started with trying to analyze these photos?

Maureen Taylor (8m 17s):
Well, if there is a caption on the back, you absolutely positively have to question that because you don’t necessarily know who wrote that caption or when they wrote it and it might not be correct. So start by looking at the format, that’s the easiest clue in your picture? Is it a card photograph? Is it a tin type which is on metal? Is it a daguerreotype, one of the very first types of photographs that’s shiny and reflective, you can see yourself in it. You know, they date from, with people in it from about 1840 all the way to about 1865. So right then and there, you’ve got a 25 year timeframe, and then you can narrow it down from there.

Diana (8m 55s):
So can you always tell if it was a Daguerreotype? What if it’s just the digital image? I mean, if you are holding the original, that’s one thing, but looking at a digital image, you know, is that easy to tell?

Maureen Taylor (9m 7s):
Daguerreotype have a very unique and distinctive appearance, even in a digital scan, there’s some kind of quality to it that makes it stand out. And sometimes even in paper photographic copies of Daguerreotypes, you can tell that it’s a Daguerreotype, plus the clothing clues add up, you know, to say a certain time period. Amber Types are on glass. They come along about 1854 and then Tin Types in 1856. It is sometimes very difficult though, to tell the difference between an Amber Type and a Tin Type in a case when it is just a digital image.

Nicole (9m 43s):
That makes sense that holding the real original would make a big difference. So are there any other types of photographs, you know, besides the Daguerreotypes, Amber Types and Tin Types, what else could it be if it wasn’t one of those?

Maureen Taylor (9m 57s):
Well, in the early 20th century, it was very popular, particularly for young women, to take photographs that were called Cyanotypes. And they’re very distinctive as well because they’re blue and it’s an amateur style of photography. And so you’d have your little Kodak camera and you could take it and actually develop your negatives in the house. You actually can use Cyanotype technology on fabric even so you could make beautiful pillows from your family photos if you had the negatives. I actually was so fascinated with Cyanotype photography that there’s an art school near me and they offered a one day class on making Cyanotypes and I signed right up and it was so much fun.

Nicole (10m 46s):
That is fun. That sounds really interesting. I think everybody kind of wants to try developing their own photographs. I remember having a class for that in middle school and just loving going in the dark room and seeing the process as they develop. So it was neat.

Diana (11m 2s):
Yeah. I’m kind of fascinated with the idea of using a photograph in family history. So how do we kind of start with using a photograph we have to further our genealogy?

Maureen Taylor (11m 17s):
Photographs contain clues that might not be apparent in our family history. And it’s easy to dismiss the clues in a picture because it’s a picture and you know who it is, right? Somebody, or maybe, you know who it is, someone has told you who it is, and that’s it, that’s as far as you go. But then if you dig down into the story of the photograph, you find out more things. So there’s this picture that I have with my great grandparents, my mother’s grandparents, and they are flanked by two grandchildren and then standing behind them is my grandmother, her sister and her widowed brother. Those are who those kids belong to.

Maureen Taylor (11m 59s):
And I knew who everyone in the picture was, but the family history clues that came out of that photograph actually surprised me because I just accepted the picture at face value. I knew who they were. I knew when they were all born, big deal, but in fact there was another story going on in the background, which is that there were more siblings than were in the picture. And so then the whole family history started to unravel like, well, why aren’t they there? And where are they and why does no one ever talk about them? And what can I find out about them? And how does this all fit together to tell my family story.

Diana (12m 39s):
I love that idea about thinking about the story, just from what you gave on that example. I would assume that you want to ask yourself, why were they taking this picture? You know, what is going on here? Because we don’t just normally all line up and take a picture. There’s something going on generally in the family.

Maureen Taylor (12m 57s):
Well, if you go to a photo studio, then it’s a formal portrait. Why do you spend the money on a portrait? What’s the occasion?

Diana (13m 5s):
Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that idea. A lot of times in these old photos, we see a little special, I don’t know, is it a signature? You know, you can kind of have some clues about the photographer and I know I have heard you talk a little bit about how important it is to figure out the photographer. So just talk to us a little bit about that.

Maureen Taylor (13m 28s):
So photographer work dates can help you really narrow down a timeframe, and your listeners are genealogists, I’m a genealogist and a picture historian. And so we have the skills that we need to research those photographers. When were they in business? How would you figure that out? What source would you use? Well, we, we use census records all the time and we use city directories and we know how to do online searching. So what I recommend is people treat the photographers like members of their family, that they want to know more about. Sometimes you find really remarkable things. Like you might find a photographer that was in business for 20 years, which really doesn’t help much, but you might find that that photographer was only in business for one year or two years in the location where the picture was taken.

Diana (14m 18s):
So would a good way to figure that out be to try to narrow down the location and then maybe do a search for photographers? Because I’m thinking I have some photos that don’t really give me a clue about.

Maureen Taylor (14m 31s):
Well, generally card photographs, I mean, not all of them, but if you have a card photograph, you know what I mean? Like a cabinet card or a little carte de visite just two and a half by four inches, they often have a photographer’s name and location on them. So then you have some starting point. If there’s nothing on the photograph and you don’t know who it is, it’s a lot more challenging of course, to figure out who might be in that picture. But if you Google a place and photographer and a name, you end up with an awful lot of modern photographers.

Diana (15m 8s):
Yeah.

Maureen Taylor (15m 8s):
But if you use a more specific way of searching, like Google books, for instance, some people have written about some of these early photographers or they’ve won prizes, or they’re in photo magazines from the time in which they worked. But really the family history documents that we use to work on our own family history actually tell us quite a bit about those photographers.

Diana (15m 36s):
Great. That’s a really interesting point. I like what you said about consider them part of the family and just research them the same way you would research your family. Well, in essence, they are part of the FAN club, right? There’s some of the associates of your family, your family went there to get their picture taken. So of course we had researched them. That is a wonderful idea,

Maureen Taylor (15m 56s):
Right? And if it’s an immigrant community, because we know about a whole bunch of people moving over together and resetting up a community in America, maybe you don’t know everything about your family and their origins, but when you start looking at the photographer they all went to suddenly, that might give you clues.

Diana (16m 16s):
Nice. I like that idea as well.

Nicole (16m 18s):
All right, Maureen, one of my favorite things about old photographs are looking at the clothing from the people in the picture. So how can we use the clothing to help identify more about them?

Maureen Taylor (16m 30s):
So I love fashion and old photos. I just do because you really get a sense of who’s fashion forward, who’s very conservative in their fashion. And fashion can tell you anything from what their economic circumstances were to, again, just how fashion conscious are they. And basically our ancestors reflect who they are as people in the clothing that they wear. And I have a few books on photo fashions to help people figure out the clues in the pictures. You can even sometimes figure out someone’s politics from what they’re wearing.

Maureen Taylor (17m 14s):
There were accessories that someone might wear that would tell you who they were going to vote for, or who they wanted to vote for in the case of a woman.

Nicole (17m 23s):
Huh. that is something I have not thought about. But what a good idea to look at those accessories and think about other things like politics. What about the types of props that were included in the photos?

Maureen Taylor (17m 35s):
Props can be so difficult, especially when someone is posed with a tiny little piece of machinery. So they have this little thing on the table, this is a case I worked on years ago, someone asked me to consult. They were a jewelry museum here in Providence, Rhode Island. And they had this image of a man posed with this tiny little piece of machinery that obviously had something to do with the jewelry industry. But as far as I know, no one ever figured out what that thing was. I mean, some of them are normal props. Some of them are props you can sort of intuit what they are, but sometimes if they’re sort of technologically based, you really have to find an expert.

Maureen Taylor (18m 16s):
Sometimes museum personnel will help you with that. I did have a photograph from a client once and a man was posed with a musical instrument. He had brought the musical instrument from home into the photo studio to have his picture taken with it. And by researching the musical instrument, it revealed this hidden interest of this person’s ancestor. They had no idea that this man played this particular musical instrument.

Nicole (18m 48s):
Oh my goodness. How fun would that be? So beyond fashion and props, what are some other clues about the photographs that you can tell from the picture like the location that was taken or if it was a postcard, any clues from that to help identify?

Maureen Taylor (19m 6s):
Well, if you have an ancestor who migrates from one coast to another, they might, for instance, pose for photographs sort of along the way. So you can actually plot their immigration route. Other clues, my favorite is when I meet with a client and I tell them when a photograph was taken and I tell them approximately how old the person is. And we intuit, you know, when they might’ve been born, I have this whole thing I do with that. And they sort of pause and then they say, but my research doesn’t go back that far. So the photographs actually predate the other types of documentation that they have on their family.

Maureen Taylor (19m 49s):
The other thing that photographs can tell you, is suppose you cannot find a marriage record for your ancestor, but you have a picture of them dressed as a bride and groom. You have evidence of that wedding. You just can’t find the other supporting evidence. And photographs are often underrated, I guess, as genealogical documents. And for me, I feel like I’m on this like one-woman campaign to get everyone to be able to read the clues, to help support what they find in other types of documentation.

Nicole (20m 20s):
You’re doing a great job on that one-woman campaign, by the way. But that is a really good point that we can use these photographs as evidence in our conclusions. And I think you’re right, that we do often overlook that as a source because it doesn’t have words, usually. It usually is more of an image, obviously. And sometimes those clues that don’t give us direct evidence are harder to use. But I think as we advance in our genealogical skill, we do start to use more indirect evidence and clues and build a case. So thank you for bringing that up.

Maureen Taylor (20m 55s):
Well, the visual clues are different than the ones you see written. I have to admit it. It’s, it’s a learning process, right? You have to figure out what the symbolism of the image is. The symbol, sometimes in a fraternal picture, for instance, or it could be anything, and sometimes, you know, one of the handiest things to have, if you have a lot of pictures and they’re all taken in places that you don’t know, or they’ve got unusual things and this bridge is in the background. Sure, you can Google that stuff. But I keep a visual dictionary by my side because I had this really great picture of all these kids dressed up in vegetable costumes.

Maureen Taylor (21m 36s):
And I had to figure out what the vegetables were. And I had to think, well, what does the top of, you know, what does the top of this particular vegetable actually look like? And so I would pull out the visual dictionary and I would say, oh, she’s dressed like a carrot, or he’s got a green bean hat, but a parsnip body. And you know, it’s like really fun. It’s I spent so much time on that photo.

Diana (22m 7s):
Oh my word, that’s hilarious. So what is your visual dictionary? Is this a paper copy of a, of a dictionary with just pictures in it? I’m just curious.

Maureen Taylor (22m 16s):
Yeah. Visual dictionary is different than a regular dictionary. So it’s a picture dictionary. If you search for a visual dictionary on like Amazon or wherever you buy your books, you can buy a dictionary that is a dictionary of pictures showing you exactly what things look like. Because not everyone, like I have a visual memory, obviously, this is why I’m the Photo Detective, I think in pictures, I dream in pictures. You know, pictures are my life 24/7. So I guess I would say I’m more visually aware than most people. I’m thinking about the optics of things, what things look like, how they relate to their physical space, all of that, but with a visual dictionary, it’s a handy little tool.

Maureen Taylor (22m 60s):
So if you have a bridge in the background, this is a perfect example, and use search bridges on Google and you don’t know what kind of bridge you’re looking for. You might come up with some unusual hits. That’s all I can say. But if you have a visual dictionary and it has pictures of all these different types of bridges in the chapter, then you can match the type of bridge and research the bridge and find out more about it. And maybe just maybe you’ll find out well that bridge was built in this year. And that’s why my ancestors are posed on the bridge and it all sort of flows together.

Diana (23m 33s):
Hm. That is so interesting. You’re bringing up so many new avenues of research. I’m loving it. So we have talked a little bit about some of the photographs that you’ve worked on. Do you have a favorite that you’ve identified?

Maureen Taylor (23m 46s):
That is so hard. They’re all my favorites. It’s the photo du jour, it’s the favorite of the day. I have lots of favorite photographs. I have a photograph that I bought at an antique shop and I started researching him and got so enamored with him and his family story that I just couldn’t stop. So I guess I would say that that’s one of my personal favorite photographs. It’s not a family member. The more I researched this person, the deeper the story gets, and I have to decide what I’m going to do with it, because it’s fascinating even may even have a link to PT Barnum.

Diana (24m 26s):
So did it have a name on the back or how did you even get started with it?

Maureen Taylor (24m 30s):
It had a name on the back.

Diana (24m 31s):
Oh, okay. As I say, if it was just a random person, it would be difficult, but with a name that changes the story.

Maureen Taylor (24m 38s):
Yeah. There was a name on the back. I was just drawn to the image.

Nicole (24m 43s):
You know, I had a friend who found a photograph in an antique store and she gave it to me and said, there’s a name on the back, this looks like a very important photograph. It was someone in military uniform shaking hands with somebody and had a couple of details and she gave it to me and said, I don’t know what to do with this. Please help me. And so we looked them up on FamilySearch. We scanned the photograph and linked it to that person. And I think a lot of people do that, where they find cool pictures at the store and they want to take it and preserve it and make sure that other people can see it.

Maureen Taylor (25m 15s):
They do. I have a whole lot of photographs with names on the back that I’ve picked up hither and yon, and I’m trying to reconnect them with family, using all the databases, because think, I think about what I would feel like if someone suddenly popped up with a picture of one of my ancestors that I don’t have a picture of. Yeah. It would be a special moment

Nicole (25m 36s):
It really would. So speaking of preserving photographs, what are some of the do’s and don’ts for taking care of our photos?

Maureen Taylor (25m 43s):
So I think of in terms of sort of like the top three things, you should do one, you know, get the right materials to store your photographs. So that would be acid and lignin free paper, you know, sleeves boxes. I call them polyester sleeves, but they could be polypropylene sleeves to store each of your images so that they don’t rub up against each other and then try to identify them because an unidentified photograph is so much more likely to end up discarded. Seriously. People throw out photographs all the time. I could tell you stories.

Diana (26m 22s):
Yeah. It’s really sad when we hear these stories of people just going through, you know, grandma’s stuff and then taking it all to the dump. Hopefully those of us who are listening, we’re all family historians and genealogists and preservationists. So we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen to our stuff or anything around us. So to wrap up this episode, let’s just talk a little bit about, of your favorite photo projects, Maureen. You talked about the Last Muster, but you have another one called the Old Providence. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Maureen Taylor (26m 54s):
Sure. So I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and I’ve lived here for awhile with a short stint or a long stand in the Boston area. But Providence is really the place I love. And as sort of my way of giving back to the community, and working with photographs from Providence over the years, I know who has pictures. I know where all the pictures are or a lot of the pictures. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to create a website which is called Old Providence or OldPVD.com where people can post images of locations, pin them to a series of historical maps and then share their family story about that moment in time.

Diana (27m 37s):
I love that you have all these projects. That’s so neat, you are a woman after our own heart. That’s so neat. Well, I think that probably you’ve given us so much food for thought that we will all be looking at our old photographs after this episode and thinking, what am I missing here? Or what else can I be learning about my family? And probably have a whole bunch of new family history projects we can do just from looking at photos. So thank you so much for coming on and giving us all this great ideas and so much food for thought, okay,

Maureen Taylor (28m 12s):
You’re welcome. Now, if anyone wants more information about photographs, they should probably get on my mailing list and they can do that on MaureenTaylor.com. I have a newsletter that comes out once a week, keeps you posted on where I’m speaking webinars that I’m offering and the latest episode of my podcast.

Nicole (28m 30s):
Wonderful, thank you for sharing that. And I know that you also do private consultations. Can you tell us a little bit more about how those work?

Maureen Taylor (28m 37s):
Okay. I have three different levels of photo consults. So some people sign up for a single photo. They have one photograph that just drives them crazy. Who’s in it. You know, what’s the details or they want me to consultancy what research they’ve done if they’re on the right path. So that’s a single photo consult. Then I have a batch of three, because for some reason it’s either one or three photographs that drive people crazy and not sure why, no idea why it’s the one or the three. But then I have another option, which is send me as many photographs as you want me to work on. And it’s an extra special price.

Maureen Taylor (29m 19s):
So if you have one photograph, it’s $40. If you have three photographs, it’s $97 for the package. But if you have more than six photographs, I drop the price significantly because I really want to work on big collections. I enjoy helping people put together all the clues in their whole collection.

Nicole (29m 38s):
Oh, that sounds really neat. Actually, I would, I can see why you’d want to work on that because looking at a whole album gives so many more clues, I would imagine than just a few isolated pieces.

Maureen Taylor (29m 49s):
So many more clues.

Nicole (29m 52s):
How neat thank you for sharing that. I think our listeners will be very interested. It’s been delightful to talk with you today, Maureen. Thank you for coming.

Maureen Taylor (30m 0s):
Thank you, Nicole and Diana.

Nicole (30m 2s):
All right, everyone. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye

Diana (30m 8s):
bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (30m 9s):
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