HISTORICAL PEOPLE WHO LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED... Love it...

https://definition.org/historical-figure-photographs/21/ Andrew Jackson.

https://definition.org/historical-figure-photographs/25/  Johnny Appleseed

https://definition.org/historical-figure-photographs/25/  Rasputin

https://definition.org/historical-figure-photographs/33/  Jesse James

Thought this selection of the many photographs presented at what was probably a click-bait site were especially interesting...

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AMSTERDAM - NOT JUST FOR "DUTCH" : JEWISH GENEALOGY post #2

Last month I posted about the National Archives of Amsterdam and said I would post more as I myself learned more about this site.  I mentioned that there are resources for those who are not "Dutch" including Jews - Dutch Sephardic Jews and Jews of the Holocaust including people who escaped to Holland may be represented.  Like many other databases that are offered by Country or Ethnic Group (Ukrainian, Irish, etc.) the data will continue to be loaded on and so checking back every so often is a good idea. There may also be spotty information due to the temporary or permanent loss of records. Still, we can be grateful for what is given as there is usually no charge, Google translate can help English-speakers quite a bit, and a person no longer has to afford to travel to go to an archive.

Today I want to mention some items within this on-line archives which are interesting!

POPULATION REGISTERS start at 1851 and are spotty. (civil)
BIRTH REGISTERS - both religious (baptismals) and others that are not (civil). These include Mennonites and Portuguese (Sephardic) Jews.
THERE MAY BE PHOTOS OF THE FAMILY included.

House numbers are NOT the same as today.

MARKET PERMITS or "Cards" say what it is your merchant ancestor was selling.  There are also PHOTOS included in this collection.  I suggest that if the market permit coincides with the history of the Holocaust you do some cross-checking with records elsewhere.

"UNDERLYING REGISTERS" important and searchable.

These include marriage bonds, contracts put out to the public (so if anyone objects, because they know someone is already married for instance, which is still done in some churches in their bulletins.) This ends in 1811 when Napoleon changed the laws.  Witnesses will be listed, as will it say if a person is divorced and to whom the bride or groom this time around was married to before! That is so valuable and unexpected.

A little more on this archive next month!

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AMSTERDAM


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SEEING THE PICTURE IN BLACK AND WHITE GAVE ME A SHOCK OF RECOGNITION

During one of my forays into tracing an ancestor, I went to a famous art library which happens to have some excellent genealogy resources.  Based on a translation, I wanted books about one of the "German Towns" in a country outside Germany. 

For those of you who don't know, Germans migrated out of Germany for hundreds of years with the understanding that they would always be Germans and welcomed back. 

There were rather strict rules about who inherited the family farm, usually the youngest son who would also stay to take care of his elderly parents. As families were generally large there were many Germans who left what would become unified nation-states and became Germany to go to other countries to establish life there based in economic need.  Generally Germans were welcome in other countries, including the United States, and were invited to settle because they were thought to be industrious.

So I began to page through the books looking at old black and white photos of these settlements. Then as I turned the page of a particular book and saw the photo of a large building and a road going past it, I was struck with a shiver of recognition.  None of the other photographs I saw had this effect on me.  

These shivers I call Truth Shivers.  Be it remembering a place from a dream (which might mean having seen it before) or a past life, the shiver made me focus on the time and place of the photo. Was this perhaps the place to next look for the ancestor who was listed on a marriage document as having come from a place with this name.

Forward several years later, I learned that the translation was correct but that another place in another country (much closer to the place the person lived for many years hence) was ALSO given this name. I know that the names of places often come from where the residents left or lived prior to moving. In the United States many settlements are named after places in England, for instance.

Unable to yet establish the person's link with BOTH places, I've let this one rest.  Maybe synchronicity will bring the answer. 

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MARK MICHAELSON's PHOTO COLLECTION - CRIMINALS

DAILY MAIL - MUGSHOT COLLECTION - MURDERES - MOBSTERS - WANTED PERSONS

link to this site to see some of the collection...

Mark Michaelson has collected more than 10,000 photographs of men and women of all races and ages, taken after their run-ins with the law...The New York-based art director and graphic designer said he has always been drawn to 'Wanted' posters, but noted when he came across his first mugshot, 'it was love at first sight'...

From murderers, pimps, hookers, thieves and miscreants, these are the faces of the many who were captured on camera at the lowest points of their lives.

And while many people would say mugshots of the past hold a certain curiosity, one man confesses what started as an initial fascination turned into an obsession.

Mark Michaelson has collected more than 10,000 photographs of men and women of all races and ages, taken after their run-ins with the law.

A SHIVER UP THE SPINE WHEN LOOKING AT A PHOTOGRAPH? ANCESTRAL MEMORY?

Have you ever had the experience of looking at a photograph and suddenly feeling a shiver go up your spine?  I have.  That shiver feels like a confirmation of truth somehow, and it certainly makes you pay attention to the photography.  What is it about a scene from another country or time and place that you recognize deeply?

I was researching one of my personal ancestral lines which, according to the marriage record I was looking at, went back to a German town in what was Hungary but is now Romania.  This was one of the towns which, while over hundreds of years was no doubt Hungarian, but the residents kept to German customs too, speaking both languages, building houses, wearing clothes, and keeping to customs that were more German.

So I wanted to see some pictures of this town and towns like it.

I went to a famous research institute, the Getty, and before I got there I ordered many books to be bought upstairs for me prior to my arrival.  Not known for genealogy, but for art, the Getty Research Institute still houses MANY books that can be very useful to researchers of family history and genealogy researchers as well as those learning about other cultures and societies for which the expression of creativity is one factor.  In this pile I found two books that were especially informative and interesting and that applied to my personal research.  These books were not available through my large city library or anywhere else I checked.

In one of them there were black and white pictures of this German town. I turned the page to  a simple street scene, and got the shiver up the spine.  None of the other pictures in the book did that to me.  I looked again.  There was something about that curve in the road.

It made me wonder if I was having a moment of ANCESTRAL MEMORY.

The theory of Ancestral Memory is that in our DNA/genes we have memories of things our ancestors have experienced.  In this case we are talking about a GGG.

This is different that Reincarnation Theories that suggest that we might incarnate in the same family, as a descendent of someone we were on earth years prior. 

With Ancestral Memory, all you have is GENETICS, your own body carrying information.  The theory has nothing to do with any spiritual belief.

Let's say that you were born and raised in the United States and identify as All American and really believe in justice and equality for everyone but you still find yourself fearing a certain ethnic group.  (I realize that admitting to such a thing may even be considered not politically correct, yet I hear people say they have such fears!)

My friend Marilyn, who only recently realized that she has German heritage in her ancestry on one side of the family, has since hearing of Germans in childhood, has always felt a little sick to her stomach at the mention of them.  She has never self identified as German and has self identified herself as Polish.  She had of course heard about World War II and the Holocaust, but she had no reason to believe that her own family heritage was any part of that.  Marilyn hated it when she learned she was genetically partly German, but she also felt there was no logic to it.  After some in depth research and interviewing family members and then reading around the history of the places they came from,  Marilyn learned that one of her ancestors had been taken from his house by German soldiers and had never been heard from again.  He was not Jewish.  This happened before World War II. When she got some photos of the town where this happened, she began to have a strong sense of having been there, of recognition.  Marilyn does not believe in reincarnation but she now believes that her fear is the fear of this ancestor.


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Ancestry Worship - Genealogy

1839 BEGINNING OF THE SALT PHOTOGRAPHS - EXHIBIT AT THE TATE - DATING PHOTOGRAPHS

HUFFPOST - FIRST PAPER PHOTOGRAPHS WERE MADE WITH SALT  By Priscilla Frank.  Note that images at this link for the full article include a nude.


EXCERPT: In 1839, British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot created the salt print, the earliest form of paper photography.  ...

The technique went as follows: coat paper with a silver nitrate solution and expose it to light, thus producing a faint silver image. He later realized if you apply salt to the paper first and then spread on the silver nitrate solution the resulting image is much sharper. His resulting photos, ranging in color from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black, were shadowy and soft, yet able to pick up on details that previously went overlooked -- details like the texture of a horse's fur, or the delicate silhouette of a tree.

These rare and early prints are the subject of Tate Britain's "Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860," the first exhibition in Britain to focus on this brief preliminary moment in photographic history. Talbot's method quickly spread from Britain around the world, not only to artists but to scientists, adventurers and entrepreneurs as well, all hungry to capture and immortalize the immediacy of the moment.


A link to the TATE where the exhibition is in London TAKE ORG - SALT PHOTOGRAPHY etc.


*****

If you'd like to bring up another post about DATING PHOTOGRAPHS, use the search feature embedded in the side bar of this blog.  Now that we know that all old photos were not sepia toned, keep an eye out when you go antiquing for these collector items.

ABE LINCOLN WITH THE BLUE OF HIS EYE : COLORISTS OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOS BRING HISTORY CLOSER

DAILY MAIL : CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS COLORIZED  by Alex Greig

British colorist Jordan Lloyd, 27, met fellow colorist Mads Madsen, 19, from Denmark when he started posting on Madsen's subreddit 'Colorized History'...

If you haven't seen this series of American Civil War Photos that have been colorized, you've got to check this link.  Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Mark Twain, General Custer... so many others. 

I notice that when I see black and white photos I tend to think of the times they were taken in as very long ago. There is a distance there. When I saw film and photographs that had been taken in color of the World War II era, I realized that wasn't so long ago.  The feeling is the same here.

FAMILY PHOTOS : THE OKLAHOMA RECORD BUSTING TORNADO

Another natural disaster - another episode of record busting and destructive weather.  I'm not going to get into END TIME predictions here, though I meet people who believe that's where we at - the end of time on earth.  Instead I'd like to say that I think it's fantastic that there is an effort - on FACEBOOK - to reunited people with the family photographs that are being found in rubble, in trees, all over, and sometimes far away from the 17 mile, 1.3 wide path of the Tornado.

(By the way, I notice that Hurricanes/ Super Storms have names but Tornado ands do not!  Why is that?!)

This has gotten me thinking about photographing all my family photos with my digital camera which has a setting called DOCUMENTS, and which allows you to take close up pictures, and holding all of them on a CLOUD or other photograph holding site, so that if ever my own rare family photos are destroyed by fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc.  they will be somewhere else.

Of course I've uploaded some photos as I use a FamilySearch product, but my paperwork (handwritten notes, photocopies, etc.) are bountiful and valuable too, and I want to preserve all that so that whomever inherits my research work and family history writing will be able to follow what I did to get to that point. 

And I'm ever more concerned with privacy issues as NO I do not want my photographs to be open to the viewing of anyone else without my knowledge and permission. 

ANCESTOR PHOTOS : WHY ISN'T ANYONE SMILING?

Why isn't anyone smiling in those old photos?  You know the one's from the 19th century and some from the early 20th century too?  Since when have people tried to appear friendly, like they're having a good time and are happy when they strike a pose?

I thought about this while looking for ancestor photos to use on this blog. 

I think I have some answers for you!

First of all, early photography required that people hold the pose for much longer than we do today when our cameras are capable of freezing the image even as we are moving.  I think having to hold a pose caused a sort of rigidity and formality to the way people held themselves. 

Don't laugh but I have one friend who holds himself this way when he takes pictures today.  He has a whole wall of such ancestor photos and well, maybe it's cultural. There is NO SAYING CHEESE FOR THIS GUY!  He looks like the FOUNDER OF A DYNASTY and twenty years older than he is, because he just doesn't smile for photos.

The main reason people didn't smile in those early days of photography has to do with - I'm feeling sure of this - because they were ashamed of their teeth!  Dental work wasn't what it is today, and you know dentures weren't what they are today.  No, even George Washington had some choppers carved of wood, some were made of bone, even whale bone.  And he was a very privileged person.

PEOPLE, rich or poor, GENERALLY LOST A LOT OF TEETH.  \They pulled teeth that hurt. Every filling you have in your mouth would probably have been a pulled tooth a hundred or more years ago!

The first I see people in photos smiling is around the Gibson Girl era when commercial images of beautiful women used for selling products appeared in newspapers.  The newspaper was affordable for the common, ordinary citizen, and I believe that when models and actresses were shown in the newspaper smiling in ads, society brides followed.  I think women started smiling in photos before men did.  By the 1920's, the Roaring Twenties, there was a change in attitude about what was decent behavior and attitude.  By the Great Depression a great many people were depressed and in photographs it shows.

Long ago I heard that an American traveling to the Society Union as a tourist should never smile on their American passport, because to the Russians a smiling person was suspicious!  Last week I heard that Russia is asking people not to smile in any passport or ID photo for another reason which is because their technology that scans these can not deal with a smile.  Very interesting but is it true?

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CIVIL WAR LINCOLN VISITING CAMP

Perhaps you can help me identify the two men in this photograph with President Abraham Lincoln!

CONFEDERATE VOLUNTEERS

EVERY OLD PHOTO TELLS A WHOLE STORY

DATING PHOTOS

Ever go into an old attic and find some photographs stored away? Here is some termonology that may help you identify them ...

DAGUERROTYPES - pioneer

AMBROTYPES - glass negatives - sharply etched appearance

TINTYPES - civil war

CARTE DE VISITES (CALLING CARDS) 1860-s' 1870's

SOLDIER - FASHION IN OLD PHOTOGRAPHYS

One way to help date old photographs is to look at the clothing the subjects are wearing, and if it is especially stylish, you may be able to find out when such styles were in fashion by reading Fashion History books. Of course, then, as today, many people wear clothing that might not be considered the latest fashion, but which is their best clothing, in order to take a photo. How to know if your photo is of a 19th century fashionista, or a poor person in 20 year old hand-me-downs?

First, especially if the photo is a wedding photo, you can be more certain that the person is wearing their best clothing, or clothing purchased or sewn for the day. This is true for the wedding party too. Any photo that appears to have been worn for a religious ceremony may be assumed to be the person's newest or best.

Secondly, examine any jewelry worn. Does it appear to be expensive? Metal and jeweled costume jewelry was not easy to come by until the Industrial age. What about hair ornaments or combs.

Third, look at hair... is it done in an elaborate style that might have required a hairdresser or maid to assist? Does the person appear to be well groomed? Is their hairstyle home-made ? (The bowl haircut on children)

Fourth, is the person wearing a uniform? If so does the uniform identify the country or side or a battle they may have been on? Are they posed in an official way?