Genealogy and Family History: Photographs

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is a popular speaker, writer, and consultant on the subject of analyzing photographs for historical and genealogical purposes.

The article, through referencing a family photograph from the early 1910s, discusses the genealogy of the Maynard family. An overview of the Maynard family's origin in Kent, England, residence in India as Protestant missionaries and settling in Victoria, British Columbia around 1915 is provided. The article presents a timeline for members of the Maynard family from 1913 through 1917, which tracks their emigration from England to Canada. Topics, including deaths, age, children, family size, birth dates, are discussed. A brief profile is provided of Joyce Maynard, including her birth in Great Britain in 1905 and her sailing from Liverpool, England to Montreal, Quebec in 1912.

A personal narrative is presented in which the author discusses six photographs collected from her family's past.

When historians, archivists, and museologists turn to Eastern European photos from family albums or collections—for example, photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of the Second World War—they seek visual evidence or illustrations of the past. But photographs may refuse to fit expected narratives and interpretations, revealing both more and less than we expect. Focusing on photos of Jews taken on the main avenues of Cern&acaron;uţi, Romania, before the Second World War and during the city's occupation by Fascist Romanians and their Nazi-German allies, this essay shows how a close reading of these vernacular images, both for what they show and what they are unable to show, can challenge the “before, during, and after” timeline that, in Holocaust historiography, we have come to accept as a given.