Image Collections
Sometimes an old photograph of an event or the village in which your ancestor lived can add some colour to your tree
One of Ancestry’s most important image sets is ‘UK, Historical Photographs and Prints, 1704–1989’, which mainly contains pictures from the Hulton Collection – the archive of the photojournalistic magazine Picture
Post. From beach scenes to busy factories, here you’ll find a diverse mixture of images documenting British life over the decades.
Although a subscription is required to view high-resolution images, you can still see thumbnails, along with supporting caption information. Crucially, these may include the names of any people in the snaps, too (see
above). On a smaller scale, Ancestry also has ‘UK, D-Day War Diaries and Photographs’, which features pictures taken during the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944.
The enormous ‘Findmypast Photo Collection’ is out of bounds unless you have a subscription or credits, but some users may enjoy exploring the site’s free ‘Dundee & Forfarshire (Angus) Photographic Collection’. This contains over 4,000 images from 1844– 2010 depicting people, places and events.
Findmypast also has the ‘World War
Two Canadian Photograph Collection’, documenting the day-to-day lives of military personnel. Most of these images are captioned with at least one name, making it an excellent resource for tracking down Canadian troops.