Product Description

You've almost certainly faced the problem: you've got an album or box of old photographs but almost all lack any identification. Family Chronicle's special publication can't help you identify the subject but it can help you with dating when the picture was taken - often within a couple of years. A number of books have already been published that describe how to date old photographs but they rely almost entirely on descriptions: Family Chronicle's book is almost all reproductions of old photographs of known date. There are over 650 pictures covering the period from the 1840s to the 1920s. By comparing your undated pictures to the examples, you will be able to compare clothing and hair fashion, the poses adopted by the subject and the background settings and establish a date within a couple of years. The book provides convincing evidence that our ancestors were at least as fashion conscious as we are today and that those fashions changed just as frequently.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #545544 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
The Family Chronicle team is a group of genealogy experts and enthusiasts who came together in September 1996 to produce Family Chronicle, the magazine for families researching their roots. Since the launch of the bi-monthly magazine, Family Chronicle has enjoyed great acclaim and has established itself as a leading magazine for genealogists and family historians.

The great success the magazine has enjoyed has lead to the publication of The Family Chronicle Collection and subsequent four Family Chronicle Years (titled Year 2-5 respectively). Each book is a compendium of the articles from each year of Family Chronicle so readers need not miss the best of the magazine. Other book titles include the enormously popular Dating Old Photographs 1840-1929, a proven tool to assist with discovering the dates of undated family photographs, and Family Chronicle's Introduction to Genealogy, an excellent companion to any newcomer to the field of genealogy.

From the same team also comes History Magazine, which looks at the social history of our ancestors. The success of History Magazine has produced two year books: History Magazine Volume One and History Magazine Volume Two.

Customer Reviews

Too little text
This magazine is less than 100 pages long and only five (5) pages are devoted to text describing how to date photos. While there is some useful information, it is too little. The rest of the pages are just old photos that are grouped by era, with no annotations to help you determine how the photo is dated. If you really want to know how to date photos as the title suggests, try a different book.

Not Worth the Money
I found that this book is not worth the money I spent for it. It is more like a magazine than a book. There are only 100 pages, (three of which are advertisements) and most of them are filled with old photographs with no explanations. The photos are classified in 5 year intervals and no detailed reasons given for why these photos are in those intervals. There is only 5 pages of text eplaining how to date these photographs and about half the text is used to give you a brief and very general history of early photography. The book, if that is what you want to call it, does not do a fair or even adequate job of helping a collector date old photographs.

Dating Old Photos
This "book" is actually a short essay. It was long on examples of old
photographs, but did little examination of those examples. The essay
is 5 pages and photos ran from page 8 to 93 with 5 to 6 photos on each page.
These photos were not identified as to their type of photographic method.
It is a fine example of a geneological collection of family photos for
the author, but hardly a book to learn from. I was quite disappointed.