Get Help Solving Your Photo Mysteries



Get Help Solving Your Photo Mysteries Find more #genealogy blogs at FamilyTree.comOne portion of your genealogy research involves photos. What that research looks like depends on your situation. Maybe you are sorting through a big box of old family photos and struggling to identify who is in them. Or, perhaps you lost your camera and are hoping there is some way to retrieve the family vacation photos that are on it. Fortunately, there are some online resources that you can utilize in order to get help solving your photo mysteries.

Identify A Photo


The Identify A Photo website is intended to help genealogists do exactly that – to get help identifying the people who are in a photo. The website is run by Vickie and David Ortiz who work hard to try and uncover the identity of each photo that is submitted to their website.

Their services are being offered for free through the Identify a Photo website. Make an account, and you will be able to upload your mystery photo. There are instructions to follow. Include as much information about the photo as you can. For example, maybe you don’t know the person who is in the photo, but you do know the location it was taken at.

Have you found an old photo after a flood, tornado, or other natural disaster? Submit that photo to Identify a Photo. The owners of that photo could potentially visit the website and identify it as their own. Your help could provide families who have lost everything with some of their precious family photos.

The Photo Detective


Maureen Taylor is The Photo Detective. She studies the clues that are in a photo in an effort to identify a person, place, or era. She has genealogical expertise. She gives a few examples that describe how she figures things out. “For instance, a wedding photo can tell you who attended the event and where the couple was married. A woman’s hat can identify her ethnic origins.”

She offers Photo Identification Consultation. Each consultation is 15 minutes in length and can include up to 3 photos per session. You can connect to Maureen Taylor via telephone, Skype, Facetime, and Google +.

CameraFound.com


CameraFound.com is an excellent resource for people who have lost their cameras (or memory cards) and are hoping that someone else found them. Those precious photos of a family vacation might be waiting for you to identify them! You can register at CameraFound.com for free. Browse through the photos from lost cameras that were found by kind people who wanted to reunite the photos with the photographer.

Did you find someone else’s camera (or memory card)? You can put a dot on a map that shows where you found it. Post a photo or two from what you found. Someone out there is hoping to retrieve those lost photos!

Image by Jeff1961 on Flickr.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* ID A Photo

* How Fashion Helps Put Dates on Photos

* Photo Types in the Late 1800’s

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