Working at the Historical Society of Easton can be both a rewarding and frustrating experience. Each year, we are approached by families who are cleaning out a relative’s home and invariably come across a few old items that are of little monetary value and/or of no particular interest to them. Among those items are old photographs that are often offered to us, and we seldom turn them down if we feel they contain some images that are pertinent to Easton’s history. Some contain images that are easily recognizable. Others are well labeled with names and dates. But too many come with no other information other than the relative who owned them.
Putting a name and location to buildings and landscapes brings out our individual detective skills. In a small town like Easton, some of us have the ability to look at a photograph and recognize the general area by either the configuration of the roadway or the topography of the landscape. Because most of the roads in town haven’t been greatly altered since the days when oxen were used to haul farm wagons, they are often easily identifiable for those of us who grew up here.
Some structures are easy to identify because they look virtually the same today as when they were built a hundred or more years ago. While others have been remodeled and greatly expanded over the years, many still retain a few identifying architectural features that are unique enough in either appearance or location to provide a positive identification to a reasonably knowledgeable historian.
Dating photographs can be somewhat of a challenge. Knowing when a building saw an addition or major alteration can help narrow it down. Any photo with a motor vehicle in it is a major aid in narrowing down the year the photograph was created. While we know that the Town Hall was built in 1937, if we have an old photo of that building that shows a 1955 Desoto parked in front of it, we’ve narrowed the date down by at least 18 years. If a license plate is visible, the shape and hue may also help. Connecticut stopped issuing their square aluminum license plates in 1957, and by 1958 all the vehicles registered in the state bore a dark blue rectangular plate with white lettering. If that Desoto still bore a square light-colored plate, the photo could accurately be narrowed to being created between 1955 and 1958 – not exact, but pretty close.
In cases when we can we know when a particular building was constructed, we may be able to assign a date to the photograph by examining the content of the image. As an example, we have several early photographs of the original Grange Hall that we know was constructed in the early 20th century. One particular photograph depicts a large crowd of well-dressed people and over a dozen early automobiles parked nearby. A little research gave us a dedication date of June 9, 1915, and our prior knowledge that Easton had a total of only 15 registered automobiles in 1915, meant that the photograph we were looking at was most likely taken the same day that the building was dedicated.
Photos of unidentified people are the much more difficult to deal with. We often receive beautiful photographs that date back as far as the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Knowing that they may end up in a dumpster makes it difficult for us to turn them down, but deciding where to store them is equally difficult. Without a name to go by, it is virtually impossible to create a file where an individual image can be stored and then located. Digitizing a photo takes up little space on a hard drive but each image needs to be individually identified in some manner so that it can later be retrieved.
Just a single name attached to a photo of one individual can lead to the identification of others. If we receive a portrait style photograph of George Marsh when he was the president of the volunteer fire company during the late 1940’s with his name on the reverse side, we then know what he looked like. We may then acquire another unidentified photo with George’s likeness that depicts him when he appeared a bit younger with a woman and three young girls. Doing a little research on ancestry may reveal the name of the woman he was married to and the name of his three daughters. Now we can attach names to all five people in a photograph that arrived with no identifying information. In addition, once we have those names, we can then research the daughters and perhaps end up knowing who they married and when. We can likewise go backwards and identify George’s parents and siblings. One clue can lead to the discovery of an entire family history.
One of our concerns going forward involves the changes in how we capture and store photographs in this modern era. Gone are the days when people purchased rolls of film, took photographs of their families, friends, houses, and family events before having them developed and made into physical prints and then put into their family albums. In this age of digital photography, where the vast majority of people now maintain their photographs in their phone or on their PC, what will happen to those memories in the future?
Much of what individuals now capture and store digitally will undoubtedly be lost to future generations. It’s not that digital photographs don’t stand the test of time. They are clearer, crisper, and don’t fade with time. But they need to be stored in a format that doesn’t end up in the recycle bin when the electronic device that holds them is discarded for the latest and greatest replacement.
Future historians will have different challenges then the ones we face today, but as it stands now, those of us who value our past still get to play detective and look for clues to identify things from the years gone by.
