Contact Form

A few weeks ago, I rescued some old family photos from storage in an old plastic grocery bag at my grandmother's house. I've been going genealogy research for a year and a half and it was exciting to finally match faces with the names of family members on my tree. In a strange way, though I had never met most of the people in the photos, I felt like I knew them. In the coming weeks I will be working on digitizing and preserving the photos in a more suitable storage arrangement.

Also exciting is the fact that this photo preservation project has given me the perfect excuse to play around with some cool tools in Photoshop that I have never used before. While I am certainly no pro and have only viewed a few photo restoration tutorials on YouTube, I am pretty happy with the results of my first few tries. A couple samples are below.

My great grandmother, Ora Lee

This is one of my favorite family photos. I love the pose and the outfit. Based on how old my great grandmother looks in the photo, I think it might be from the 1920s or 1930s but I'm not sure. The image is from a photocopy I found, and it's not a very good photocopy either. There are a bunch of little lines running all across the page, which made sharpening up the details on the photo somewhat difficult. I'm hoping to come across the original photo but I haven't been able to find it yet. There's still a huge smudge beneath her necklace that I haven't figured out how to remove yet, but overall I think it looks pretty good.
Ora Lee
  Ora Lee
Before
After

My great, great grandmother, Kate, with son (Emmitt) and daughter (Ora Lee)

Apparently people didn't smile in photos in the early 1900s. And they also dressed their little boys in, well, dresses, most likely because it was more economical to reuse young children's clothing for both sexes or maybe it was just the style of the time. This photo is one of the most challenging photos I have; it's faded, scratched and stained and scribbled on. But I also got lucky with this photo since I found two copies (both damaged, but in different places) so I was able to repair the baby's hand and the mother's lip using bits from the alternative copy. I'm pretty happy with it.
Kate, Ora Lee, Emmitt
  Kate, Ora Lee, Emmitt
Before
After

My great, great grand aunt, Rebecca, with children

The ladies in the photos below and above were married to brothers and the two families were neighbors in Hallettsville, TX. In fact, when Kate and her husband Ira died sometime around 1918 (most likely in the flu pandemic), my great grandmother Ora Lee and her siblings were taken in by Rebecca and her husband, my great, great grand uncle Albert. This photo was probably taken around the same time as the photo above. On the back of the photo is the name of a portrait studio, Fey & Braunig, which operated in Halletsville until 1907. That means that the photos below and above are over a century old, which I think is amazing.
photo restoration before
  photo restoration after
Before
After
Looking through old photos has certainly brought to life the names on my family tree that I have been researching since I started doing genealogy nearly two years ago. In genealogy, it's easy to get caught up in searching the paper trail for facts--names, dates, places--and forget the flesh and blood beings that my ancestors really were. I hope that as I progress through this photo restoration and preservation project it will add a bit of humanity to my family history research.