Says a photograph of the wedding of my paternal grandparents Walter bolt and Lizzie Jane. Christine. As you can probably see, wedding photographs are very useful for showing different generations of the same family. Here we have brothers and sisters of the bride and groom, and also both sets of parents, my great grandparents. Sometimes these photographs will be the only time you'll get to see those older family members from the recent past. Although photography has been around since the 1840s, most people did not have cameras themselves until the mid 20th century.

So photographs were very formal takens for special occasions like this. For me, it is good to see those names on my tree brought to life. My grandfather's parents, the man with a white beard and his wife to the left of him and my grandmother's parents, the lady with Large hat at the back and to her right the rather portly man with the moustache. I remember talking about these relatives with my late father. There are a few stories that came out about some of these great uncles and aunts in this picture. Not all of them good.

This photograph was taken in 1914, just before World War One. However, you're not always lucky enough to know the data the photo, and you might have to do some detective work to narrow it down to a decade. The costumes, hats and hairstyles and this photograph would all help and it's a good idea to find a book about the history of costume to help you identify the approximate time. Also, do not overlook the details outside of the photograph. If there is a frame like this one, most professional photographs would come with the name of the photographer, and where he was based. You may still find details of all different offices online and I was indeed able to find information about the L swales, who was based in Port St. Mary in the Isle of Man, which is where my grandparents married.

And I was interested to find that he was a fairly well known local landscape photographer. As well as doing formal portraits like this one. You might be able to find out the date the photographer was active, which can then help date your photograph is a photograph with a mystery attached to it. The kind of photographs that can spark off a line of research. First of all, as you can see it as a young man in military uniform taken at the start of World War One. It was very common at this time for soldiers, airmen and navy men on their way to war, to have a photograph taken as a keepsake for their loved ones while they are away.

And also in case they never returned. It's not Easy to see in this photo. But sometimes you can make out the military insignia on cap badges, and perhaps from that find out the regiment he was in. However, this photograph has a bit of a story to it as well. It is connected with my maternal grandmother. My mother's parents were married in 1923.

And my grandmother was 30. Well, my grandfather was much old, older, age nearly 60, having had a previous marriage. After his death, she carried a locket with his photograph and all her life after she died, and the locket was looked at, another photograph was discovered behind the one of my grandfather. And this was it. My grandmother had no brothers. And so we can only guess that this was a young man with whom she was perhaps romantically involved with, who perhaps died during that war.

Some little bits of information came To light about this person's name, we think he was jack Leonard. And this photograph may have been taken in Brighton, which is strange because my grandmother lived in Manchester. I did carry out some research on this. And while I never found any definite answers, I think that he actually survived the war but died in the flu pandemic which tragically killed many thousands of people after the end of World War One. My grandmother herself nearly died in that pandemic, which adds fuel to my conjecture. Here lies one of the many frustrations of family history research.

Sometimes you are only left with possibilities rather than definite answers, but it is certainly fun to try out. Try and find out the answers to these puzzles. Honestly, this is my maternal grandmother on the far left with this photograph with her six sisters and her mother, my great grandmother in the middle of foreground. This is another photograph that can be fairly easily data from looking at the clothes and hairstyles. And in fact, it was probably in around 1907 when my grandmother was about 15. It was partly this photograph that led me to try and find out more about these seven sisters their lives during and after the First World War, and led me to writing an article about how women's lives changed at this time.

Using the Seven Sisters as a focal point. The article got published in one of the major family history magazines, and it just goes to show how a single photograph can set up a line of research lead to other things. There is another element to this photograph, which adds a certain poignancy and importance to it. My research on this family has led me to find that my grandmother and her younger sister Dorothy just to her right had been fostered out in their youth. The reason for this was that my poor great grandmother suffered greatly after the early death of her husband at the age of 35. And got into financial difficulties and bad health, and ended up staying in a workhouse infirmary for time.

I believe that this photograph was taken to mark the family being back together again, and in the light of that research is far more moving than it originally seems. So this is an example of how photographs like this can act as illustrations to your research, and how your research can add depth to the meaning of the photograph. I hope you've enjoyed this tour through some of my own family photographs, and that it is motivated you to find and investigate some of your own family photographs. And the next lecture I'll be talking about how to change Start your family tree.