Approaches to Filling in the Who or What, Where, and When to Photos

Shortly after a creeping wildfire veered away before engulfing our home, I vowed to go through boxes of print photos and put them in family albums. When the smoke cleared, I made albums for my adult son, and another for my husband for Christmas presents. My photo album is still a work in progress.

I started with print photos because they include the older pictures I’m more likely to add to family stories and histories. I collected the print photos from various cubbyholes, desk drawers, storage boxes, and letters I’d saved over the years.

When I had all the print photos in a pile, I decided to first sort them by year because I wanted photo albums by chronological order. You may want to organize your family photos by person, place, activity, or some other criteria.

I made sticky notes for each decade from 1880 until 2020 and spaced them around the perimeter of the dining room table and started sorting photos into their respective decade.

I soon ran into a snag. Undated photos. Lots of them. Unlike some of my diligent family members, including my sisters, I, and other family members, hadn’t added dates to print photos. And some photos didn’t identify who or where, which I also wanted to include in my albums. The subjects of all my family photos were people. If you have photos where the subject is plants, animals, buildings, vehicles, or whatever, you’ll want to note the “what” of the photo and the date and location.

To collect the missing pieces information, I employed one or more of the following five methods of identification.

Add what you already know

The first approach was simple. Many of the dated photos also listed the names of people and locations, or I already knew these two additional pieces of information. Using a non-photo blue pencil, I added missing facts to the back of the photos. I wrote with a light hand so as not to mar the front of the photo. (Some people use a #2 soft lead pencil.)

After sorting the dated photos in chronological order, I placed them in photo boxes and inserted a marker for each decade. This gave me a start and I could see visual progress.

However, I had stacks of photos with missing dates and other information. Since I’m going to do all this work, I thought, I might as well do it right. My goal was not only to make the albums for my husband, son, and me to enjoy. I hope they are also an eventual gift for later generations as they read my family’s stories and histories.

Add what you can deduce

The second approach was also easy. I could add a lot of information just by looking at the pictures. For instance, I had several photos from my grandparents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. Since I knew their date of marriage in 1925, I easily added the date to snapshots taken at their anniversary celebration in 1975. And when I found a photo that included some of my younger cousins and son at my grandparent’s home, I knew it was taken on or around the same date.

I added other dates to photos when I could easily remember when weddings, births, anniversaries, graduations, and other special events occurred.

Add what you find easily

The third approach took more digging, but it was fairly straightforward. Sometimes I could find dates I needed using paper or digital genealogy records and then computed the date of the photo date using known facts. When an aunt sent a photo of titled “Grandpa P on his 86 birthday,” I found his date of birth, added 86 years, and dated the photo. My aunt also told me the photo was taken at his home, which I’d visited, so I could also add the location.

I could see more progress as I filled a cardboard photo box with pictures in chronological order.

Ask for family members’ help

The next step? Bring in the big guns! This fourth method took more effort, but provided unforeseen blessings.

Over many mornings after breakfast, my husband and I went through his family photos, one by one. As I labeled them, he also told me more about his childhood and his family’s history.

I also learned more “stories” along with the “facts” when I asked my son to help identify the “when,” “who,” and “where” of some of his photos.

For my photo album, I let my family know I was putting together photo albums and needed their help. I made digital copies (scanned or taken with my iPhone) and texted or emailed them to family members. Or sometimes we discussed a photo while using Facetime. Facebook was not an option for me, but it might be for you and your Facebook family group.

Depending on who was in the photo, I asked different family members specific questions. For instance, I asked, “Mom, who is that man standing next to you and Grampa?”

Family members often replied with more than I’d asked for—other tidbits of information or stories about the people involved.

But the biggest blessings were strengthened relationships and fun working with my husband, son, sisters, mother, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other family members.

As an unexpected bonus, a previously unidentified photo became the perfect picture for the cover of a family history I’m writing about a great-great-grandmother.

I’d made a dent in my stack of unidentified photos, but I still had piles to go.

Do the Math While Counting the Years

The fifth method I employed helped me make better guesstimates.

Fortunately, I had several photo boxes filled with pictures of my son when he was a child. Unfortunately, I hadn’t dated many of them.

For some photos, I remembered enough that I could calculate the date, like my son’s first studio photo taken when he was two weeks old. For other photos, I used my best guess. I sorted photos by pre-teeth, baby teeth, and adult teeth. Sitting up, crawling, learning how to walk. No shoes, baby shoes, cowboy boots. Shorter than me, taller than me.

From several school photo envelopes, I learned the date I’d ordered the photos. Some envelopes included only the name of my son’s teacher. From this, I could usually translate into a grade, which I could then translate into a year. After I’d added the date to some photos, I could use that to identify dates of others by my son’s haircut, appearance, height, clothing style, or activities. In one case, I noticed the same striped t-shirt in a school photo that I then recognized in several candid pictures.

For example, as I studied one of my son’s school pictures, I thought, Okay, this is his school picture for fourth grade, and he was born in . . ., so this one was taken in. . . .I did the math in my head, then verified it by counting on my fingers. He was ten during fourth grade. “Hmm,” I muttered. “That’s not entirely accurate.” Actually, he was nine when he started school that fall. He turned ten the next month. School photos were usually taken a few weeks after his birthday. So those few weeks in August and September are irrelevant for this calculation. He was ten during almost all of his fourth grade. Which meant the photo was taken in . . ..

Because not everyone is born on 01 January, I grew tired of doing mental gymnastics so I could do the math while counting the years. (Before I completed these calculations, I hadn’t discovered timeanddate.com’s “Days Calculator: Days Between Two Dates,” (which also provides the number of months, and years and months).

Necessity—or desperation—is the mother of invention. After several convoluted calculations, I made a cheat sheet on a sticky note. In the first column, I listed, line by line, my son’s age from 0 for his birthdate to 22. I included the corresponding calendar year/month/day in the second column. In the third column, I included his school year from kindergarten to college graduation.

I transferred the info from the sticky note and word document to an Excel spreadsheet. I added other items to help jog my memory, like where we had lived and the names of the schools he had attended. For your family, you might include other pieces of information that will help you identify the when, who, and where of your photos. This could be your children’s achievements, awards, and activities, recitals, sporting events, or camps.

For families with multiple children, you can make a spreadsheet placing the calendar year in the first column and perhaps where you lived in the second column. Then add several columns for each child for age, school year, and other identifiers.

The little time it took to make a sticky-note cheat sheet that morphed into a spreadsheet saved me a lot of time identifying the bulk of my son’s photos.

For older photos, I noticed hair and clothing styles and I’ve asked my husband to help me identify makes and years of automobiles.

Finally, the small photo box now holds my print photos, sorted into chronological order, waiting for me to take my step of putting family albums together. And some images of older photos I’ve already added to family stories and histories.

• How do you identify or estimate dates, places, and names of people in your family’s print photos you want to include in your family stories and histories?
• What’s your plan for adding family photos to digital or print albums or to your family stories and histories?
• What tips do you have for others to help them identify when, who, and where in their family print photos?