A Picture is worth MORE than a 1,000 words!

 Anyone who knows me, knows that I love pictures! 

I love taking pictures (my kids know this all too well!), looking at pictures, scrapbooking about pictures, collecting pictures, sharing pictures, and including pictures of people and places in my family trees.

Our daughters, they still laugh like this when they are together!

Having photos of my family (and my husband’s family) is important to me. The names and dates and even stories about people just don't “bring them to life” like a photo does. Last year, I made it my project to decorate our upstairs hallway with a family tree of photos. (It wasn’t my idea, I used this blog to guide me). I love walking by it every day and seeing the people who made Jim and I who we are. But I also recognize that just one photo of a person is not enough, because one quick moment in time can’t possibly give a sense of who they were as a person. Pictures may be worth 1,000 words, but a life can never be summed up in one photo!

About 25 years ago, my search for old family photos truly began. 

It wasn’t intentional, it was “just one of those things”. My dad and I were at the Hitching Post Antiques Mall in Tecumseh, Michigan (close to our family cottage). We were both drawn to the postcards and we just started looking through the Michigan and Sand Lake Collections (n.b. there are two Sand Lake’s in Michigan) and I found a postcard of this photo. It was labeled “Opening Day, 1907”.

Lodge Hoowanneka, Opening Day 1907, Sand Lake, Lenawee County, Michigan

While it’s a fun picture, it has so much more significance! The sign on the cottage says “Lodge Hoowanneka”, which is the name of our family cottage on Sand Lake!! It was one of the first really old photos I saw of our cottage. We since have found many more, but finding this at an antique store gave me the desire to look for those proverbial needles in a haystack and I have been sifting through old photos and postcards at every antique store I can get to, looking for anyone or anything connected to my husband or my family.

I also started using a variety of on-line tools. 

(Now they are plentiful, just see the recent FamilyTree Magazine article that outlines 13 really amazing repositories of photos. Ancestry.com and myHeritage are there, but there are lesser known ones like DeadFred and Digital Public Library of America. Warning–you will tumble down the rabbit hole!) 

Post on Genealogy.com Surname Forum

In 2010, one of my first amazing finds was this one of my great-grandfather, Edward James Leach, when he was a student at Olivet College (1901-1902). (This is where he met my great-grandmother, she was also attending Olivet College.) I don’t remember exactly how I ended up at genealogy.com where they host surname forums, but I found a post from 2003 by a genealogy angel who said she had a photo of Edward Leach. I contacted her and she sent me a beautiful print (for a price). I later found out that she did this as a business, she owned an antique store in Northville, Michigan.

L: Bartley Thomas, T:Howard Ellis, B: Edward Leach, R: Maurice Jones
Olivet College, c. 1901

Paying it Forward

This experience planted a seed that continued to germinate as I went to antique stores. 

Over the years, while I haven’t found a whole lot of our own families, I asked myself, wouldn’t I appreciate, and be really surprised, if someone looked through antique stores and shared with me a photo of one of my ancestors? So why don’t I become one of these genealogy angels who connects old photographs with their descendants? I look for semi-identified photocards, my favorite time frame is 1880s-1910s, research the people and then try to build out trees to people who might be living now. I didn’t keep track at the very start, but since 2013, I have been successful in connecting nearly 50 photos. I don’t charge a fee, I tell people, this is truly my hobby and joy to reconnect them with family who will appreciate it. 

I have two favorite picture/stories from this experience so far. One was from an 84 year old woman, Rowena, who wasn’t directly descended from the adults in the photo, but she personally knew all of the people in the photos because they were cousins. She had never seen any of these photos and was truly thrilled to own them and share with family. A second, Dave, was so excited by my find of his grandfather that when he received it, he took the photo and put it next to the 50th anniversary photo of his grandparents and sent it back to me to show me the resemblance. Some day, I’m hopeful that someone does this for me, but in the meanwhile I will just take joy in those that I connect with others!

Rowena's cousins

David's Grandfather

What made me think of this today?

Well, last night watching Lisa Louise Cook’s Elevenses with Lisa episode from 1/13/23, she shared a new-to-me resource, ArchiveGrid. This is an amazing free platform brought to us by the same people who created WorldCat. Everything in an Archives can’t be digitized, there just isn’t enough time (I saw for myself this very fact in the Bucknell University Archives today!) but ArchiveGrid is a catalog of the holdings in Archives around the world (yes, not just the U.S). I tested the waters last night and BINGO!! 

In a collection at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan, they have a file called, “Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County photograph collection” that contains 5 envelopes and in them includes two exciting finds. The first is a photo of the family home/farm of Samuel Obed Tubbs (1834-1917), my great-great grandfather! Samuel Tubbs was married to Francis Eliza Randall (1837-1924), who is the daughter of Timothy Castle Randall (1806-1849).

Francis Eliza Randall (1837-1924)
my great-great grandmother

Samuel Obed Tubbs (1834-1917)
my great-great grandfather

The collection says that it includes photos of Timothy Randall’s children and grandchildren. It doesn’t identify who exactly, so I’ve asked for all of them! They aren’t digitized so I haven’t actually seen them, but they are ordered and I will patiently (or not so patiently) wait the 6-8 weeks while they digitize them. Jim said I could just wait until the summer when I am at the lake and go myself….clearly I’m not THAT patient! 

This won’t be the last time I blog about my photos or finding them, I am certain!

In the meanwhile, wishing you lots of luck finding your own treasured pictures worth more than 1,000 words.