Topic: From the family archives

[Francois]

I just stumbled onto a bit of a silver mine.
Back in the 1980's, my dad had the chance to gain access to some really old photos that were taken by some of his family who went to live in the US.
So, he took the prints to work and copied them using some Polaroid 55. I found a bunch of the duds that didn't make it into albums or frames.
Here are two that might be of some interest.
These were taken in the 1910's.
I believe the man on the picture was one of the ancestors that went in the US military, but it could have been the photographer himself. There were two people who were working as photographers in the family at that time.
The picture is most likely taken by Ulrich Bourgeois.

I scanned them a bit bigger than I usually do so that you can get a better view.

[Indofunk]

silver mine

I see what you did there 😉

I often wish that my 1921 cornet could talk about its experiences ... but it seems that old pictures really do talk to you and tell you about what was going on at the time! (Too bad it can't tell you the subject's name though 😉)

[Francois]

In this case I could pretty easy to find out. (my mom told me that it was possibly Louis Laverdure who was a photographer for the US Army. His job was to photograph everybody who joined the army. He breath-in so many chemicals from the flashes and the lab that he died very young.)

But on a lot of other pictures, the people are all but a mystery to me.
Heck, I didn't even recognize my own grandpa when he was young (and a good 50 lbs lighter). 

[LEAFotography]

Interesting! Photography runs through your family. I think the only one in our family who used a camera was a great uncle who made slides of butterflies in 1970s.

Is that a 10x8 glass negative he's holding in that first image?

[Francois]

Really looks like it.
It probably was a Dry Plate as these had been invented about 40 years before that picture was taken.

These are the only two people who were really into photography on my dad's side.
On my mom's side, she had an uncle who was a catalog photographer for Eaton's (they were a large chain of department stores with a catalog mail order division). Then there was my grandpa who really liked photo stuff.