Illustrating Your Family History

Halvor Moorshead describes some sources of illustrations.

Shoemakers demonstrating their craft in a photo taken between 1840 and 1860, exactly the time period that the author’s gggrandfather was in this trade. Library of Congress Photo.	Detroit in 1889, only a few years after the author’s ggrandfather lived there. This illustration was found in the Maps section of the American Memory website.	The railroads around Ionia, Michigan in 1876, the exact year the author’s ggrandfather worked for the Detroit, Lansing and Lake Michigan RR in that city as a bookkeeper. Library of Congress Map.

Alton, Illinois, just north of St. Louis, where the author’s father was born in 1915. This is part of an enormous panoramic photograph available on the American Memory website.

Attica, Indiana in 1869. This is about 17 years before the author’s family was there but is still an attractive addition to the family history. Both bridges were destroyed in a major tornado in 1886. Today, the piers of the old bridges are still there.

Sources
By far my favorite source, one that I have browsed for hours, is the
Library of Congress American Memory website: http://rs6.loc.gov/amhome.html. This has an enormous collection of early photographs and maps and the collection is constantly growing. All of the pictures on this page were found there.
For most of us, the images available on the Internet are of sufficient quality to use in a family history but quality prints can be ordered from the Library of Congress for a very reasonable cost; the details are on the website.

It is now possible to search the web for images based on keywords. Use the Lycos search engine: www.lycos.com/picturethis/ and you may select from 18 million images. This is not as good as it sounds. A picture or illustration is included and indexed by computer and only works on the file name of the originator. You may want to find pictures of a small town but every image which has a file name mentioning that word will be offered. This may include even the name of a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) which will mean that every image of every customer is offered to you; this makes image selection almost impossible. Lycos has recently added 40,000 images in an area that they call their Now & Then Image Gallery. It is easy to search and images are generally very good but I found nothing to help me personally. These images have also appeared on a couple of CD-ROM collections that I own.

The Francis Frith Collection Pangbourne, Berkshire, 1893. Church Lane, Lelant, Cornwall, 1892. Abingdon, now in Oxfordshire, 1893. Tyrrel Street, Bradford, Yorkshire, 1903. Francis Frith was a Victorian pioneer photographer. After 1860 he made it his life's work to capture for posterity every British town and village. His photographs were enthusiastically bought by Victorian holidaymakers as souvenirs of rare days out. The company he founded created an archive that is recognized today as being of national importance, famed for the quality of its images and as a record of British life and heritage over the last 100 years. The Frith archive continued taking and publishing photographs until 1969. By this time it had accumulated an archive of over 330,000 photographs depicting some 6,000 British towns and villages. The Archive provides a unique record of British topography, created as it was by one company, continuously, over a 110-year period. The Frith Archive is now owned by Heritage Photographic Resources Ltd. which specializes in publishing and marketing products based on the Archive under the trading name The Francis Frith Collection. Six thousand of these images can be viewed at a UK or US website: http://www.francisfrith.com/ The prints are not inexpensive but they are of excellent quality. Two CD-ROMs containing 3,500 images each (one of images of Britain, and the other with images of churches from Cornwall) are available in North America for $29.95 or $24.95 (or a compilation for $39.95) from The Francis Frith Collection USA, 11447 Canterberry Lane, Parker, Colorado 80138 Tel: (303) 736 5909 or by visiting http://www.francisfrith.com/us/store/. All images copyright Heritage Photographic Resources Limited.

It is now possible to buy collections of 30,000, 80,000, even 150,000 images on CD collections for modest prices. These may have what you want but the image resolution is are often limited on the majority of pictures. If they do not call the images High Resolution on the box, you can bet they are of marginal quality, even for a limited print family history.

Corel offers 80,000 images on the web — at a price. These are excellent quality photos and you can view good sized images over the web but their company logo is impressed over the image, making the quality apparent but unusable. They can be found at http://corel.digitalriver.com/ (this link was not in service at the time this page was posted).

Corel can’t seem to make up its mind about a pricing policy. They have increased prices and reduced choices in the last year or so. The cost for a good resolution picture is nearly $30 buying it on-line. However I was able to purchase the complete CD with 100 images for the same price and I got it the next day. When I asked about this 100:1 price differential, Corel’s order-taking staff were as confused as I was. This site is a superb resource but it is badly in need of organization.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1999 issue of Family Chronicle.