| Chromotype Images |
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A while back, a few members of the family said that it would be a good idea to do something about our family tree, so muggins here volunteered to get it done. I've been using MacFamilyTree (on a Mac of course!) to enter the details and so far have managed to get back to around 1813 on my Mums side, and just around 1900 on my Dads side. All sorts of things tend to get unearthed in Genealogy, and one day we came across an old (really old) photograph album.
The ones to have survived the best seem to be from the 1880's which are card mounted 'Chromotypes' But just looking at these Chromotypes in the album hides a very nice feature. Looking at the few that I've scanned so far reveals that they appear to have been taken over a long period as the back graphics for one Photographer have changed three times, and that the Photographers were located within a 15 mile radius of at least one of my ancestors from the 1880's. Not all the photographs in the album are family members, as some are of Vicars and as far as I know all members of the family from that period were Farmers. The next thing to do is see if I can link names to the faces as I've no idea who the people are at the moment. I traced the Photographers studio in the 1891 Census and know from that, that there were three Photographers active at that address in 1891. Apart from Peter Greenhalgh, the others appeared to be his Son and his Son's wife. Since there is no mention on the back of the card of the Son, I would think the odds are that the image shown was taken earlier than 1891. You can find quite a bit about the Chromotype process on the Internet along with some large collections of such images. |
The album is beginning to fall apart and most of the photographs are 'well viewed' in that some have faded to almost nothing or they have been scuffed with lots of fingers over the years.
Normally the back of each card has some very intricate graphics to show off the Photographers Studio and artistic prowess. I've scanned around 20 of these photographs so far and tweaked them a little in Photoshop to remove blemishes and enhance the images.