Town of Newburgh History

Restoring old photos

By Alan Crawford
Posted 1/13/22

One of the most intriguing things I encounter is the identification of old photographs. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but either way you have fun and learn. With the technology available …

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Town of Newburgh History

Restoring old photos

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One of the most intriguing things I encounter is the identification of old photographs. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but either way you have fun and learn. With the technology available today, the ways you can manipulate a photo are rapidly increasing and making it easier and easier. You can change the entire background, you can restore, you can colorize, and even animate. And there are those of you who are mischievous, and you’ll send out the proverbial Christmas card, a photograph of the entire family, with one slight modification, you edit in an extra child or person. Depending upon your sense of humor, well, you can see there are plenty of options available.

I’ve undertaken digitizing many family photos to both preserve and share them with others. There are many social platforms out there, and in the future, I’m sure many more to come. While we strive to learn of our past, the travel can be tedious and fraught with misinformation. Too many individuals copy and paste information without any validation, only looking to fill in a blank spot in their genealogy. I’m in the process of exploring my maternal family tree and it is both exciting and tenuous since my grandfather was orphaned and placed in an orphanage. I’ve been tracking down and obtaining death certificates which have both confirmed or changed previous family tribal knowledge. Sometime, I’ll expand on this, but for now, let’s continue with photos.

With cooler weather upon us, and many of the outdoor chores have been put away for the season, I’ve returned to working on digitizing many family photos. I’ve carefully removed them from frames and scrapbooks, scanned, and labeled them. One frustrating issue is the lack of identification of the people in the old photos. I believe much of this was simply due to the idea everyone had back then, sharing the same thought… “who would ever forget Uncle Xxxx?” Go figure, we did! Or, perhaps, the tribal knowledge was not passed down father to son, mother to daughter, and so on for whatever reason. We have the opportunity to rectify this.

Trying to identify the people in vintage images requires us to make use of the tools we have available. First, when was the picture taken? Seems difficult? Not all that hard. Think about the techniques used to capture the image:
Daguerreotype (1840’s to early 1860) , Ambrotypes (1855 to 1865),

Tintypes (1856-1890’s) Cartes des Visites (introduced in 1859)
Cabinet Cards (1860 to Early 1900’s)

While we can just whip out our cell phone and take a selfie today, taking a photo way back when was a somewhat expensive proposition and only done to commemorate significant milestones. Home photography? Even in the early 20th Century, owning a camera was a luxury, not only with respect to the equipment, but also for the film costs and associated developing costs. Then came the Brownie, the Polaroid, the Canon AE-1 35 millimeter, etc. of which I must have at least one of these tucked away in a closet.

Now that we have determined a relative time period based on the type of image, look at the clothing, hair styles, and background. Vanity has always been a big part of the nature of our being. How many of you look back at some of the styles of clothing of our youth and have either laughed out loud or became a bit embarrassed. Especially when our children and grandchildren dig out the photo albums over the holidays.
With the time period narrowed down, think of the relative age of the people. This will rule out a number of people you may have thought of as a possibility. If the clothing is circa 1920, and the ancestor you think of would have been 40 years old at that time, you can rule out all the younger an older people in the image. A closer inspection of the background may reveal a country setting, buildings, and so on. Perhaps you can identify a building, but it is long gone. Well, when was it demolished? You’ve just narrowed the time frame again. Remember, it’s not only what is there, it is also what is not.

Another example of identifying an individual is reaching out to family and friends. Let me provide a personal example. I had a photo of two men. After comparing notes with other family members, it dwindled down to two possibilities. For quite a while, and let me say years, nothing happened to validate their identities. Then one day, while researching an article, I was chatting with a senior citizen of our Town who knew my family, including my Grandfather and his brothers. On a hunch, I went home, cropped the photo, enlarged it, and returned to Tony (he’s 94). When I showed him the photo, he looked and said “Is that your Uncle Norm”. His friendship with my Uncle Norm, and sharp memory, confirmed my thoughts. Identification is rather easy when someone knows the person in the photo firsthand.

What I’m saying is to all of you of the younger persuasion, get out and visit older relatives and family friends! Chat, show them photos which you don’t have information on! You may be surprised what you learn. And, sadly, this resource is not renewable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

We’re beginning to develop facial recognition software, though I’m not familiar with it other than a few experiments. I may spend some time this winter season exploring what it offers. It may be the boon to identifying old photos by comparing them to people whose identities are known in other images. What we’re doing today, documenting what we have, may provide the foundation for future generations doing research. Take some time and go through those old photos and get them labeled and scanned! Now!

And, here’s a photo just sent to me a few days ago. I’ve shared it with two other historians and we all have a sense of familiarity, but haven’t identified the people and place, yet. Obviously the older gentleman in the center is key. Any thoughts? Perhaps one of you have the piece of the puzzle which will identify the people and location. Hopefully we’ll have an answer.