The Photo Faces of America

The United States Library of Congress has joined with the online photo site ‘Flickr’ to help bring the massive collection of photo images to the homes of researchers. Inspecting this homepage offers up such a variety of topics.

Known as the Library of Congress’ Photostream, there are seventeen major set of photos.  They range from images during the American Civil War, to travel scenes across the country, old-time baseball players, life during the 1930s and 1940s, the old West, World War One, plus a huge collection of historical event photos, over eight thousand, from the 1910s. Another super group is the illustrated newspapers of the New York Tribune beginning in 1908. These are an assembly of photos and drawings with very ornate decorations and a great deal of  information.

In viewing each collection, they are first arranged in thumbnail size (small).  You can place your computer mouse over an image to see a brief synopsis of the photo. If interested in viewing it, just click once on that image. It can be enlarger further to see detail.  Alongside will be a description of the time period and events of the photo. For viewing historical periods in America’s past, these serve a great purpose.  Those especially from the Library of Congress, can be downloaded to your own computer. A selection of photo sizes are also available.

Use the search box in the upper right corner to investigate if any hometown or family surname could be in this collection. Another feature with this site is the ‘Everyone’s Uploads.’  Here will be additional images individuals own that they have placed on the site. Many of these will be more contemporary items, but there are also a good number of older photos.

The above image is from 1900 (in the Library of Congress) and featuring four young ladies on the steps of the Atlanta University in Georgia. Maybe you can identify one of them?

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