Dressing the part

I was delighted to have two cousins visit yesterday; we had a lovely day together, we talked, and laughed and compared notes and looked at photographs to do with our shared great-grandparents. We had inherited photographs from our family, me from my aunty and my cousins from their mother. Some of the photos were very old and without knowing who the subjects were we tried to work out whether they were from our shared family or from ‘the other side’!

There were several photos which were a complete mystery, and we tried to work out who they were by looking at other details, particularly the costume that people were wearing. We could guess that some were from the late nineteenth century, but our knowledge of fashion was so limited that we were quite stuck. As ladies skirts became shorter the further into the twentieth century we felt they were but as for details of buttons or frills or waistcoats or collars, we were completely lost!

We looked at one very old photo and decided the people in it who were celebrating a wedding must be country people; it was something about their stance, their boots, the sprigs of blossom in the men’s button-holes… but apart from that we could tell nothing more.

There was another photo which we deduced was in the 1940’s, we also thought the people who were again attending a wedding must be some of our Jewish family; it was again little details, the hats the men were wearing and some indefinable ‘look’ of the happy smiling people themselves.

A friend has recommended a book which has information about ‘reading’ old photos; when I have it and have studied it, then maybe I will learn a little more about the anonymous family photos!

By the way the two handsome gentlemen in my feature photo are my husband’s grandfather and great-grandfather, and I think this must have been taken in about 1905; Ernest the younger one looks about twenty-four, don’t you think, and John, his father looks to be about fifty.