For unknown photos:
Start a Flickr album of unknowns and give it as many tags as you can and maybe people will find their family on a Google search. There are also websites that post unknown photos. My cousin had her dad’s WWII photos. I scanned them all and uploaded to Flickr, and contacted the alumni associations of the unit and campaign, and shared the links.

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Excellent advice, thanks.
I have many family pix, some labelled, some not. Some pix which may be family, may be family friends…
I sat with my mother many times as she talked me through the albums. But I didn’t take notes. Now, when I can’t ask her; which one was Auntie Deborah, & which Auntie Hannah? A few mysteries, thankfully not too many.
My frequent rant is that we are, suddenly, at a point in history when photos & documents can be scanned & emailed for nothing to many, many people, & with the accompanying story. You have items they don’t. They likely have things you don’t. Leave it much longer, & whoever has such things will be a generation further away. Share the images & the stories now.will the results from 2 sister with the same biological parents be the same
I don’t know if you are doing this still, as I received the blog just last week, but I have a problem I am not sure you can handle. <y great-great-grandfather, according to family legend, was born "at sea". This is mentioned on 2 death certificates of his children….as a result, I cannot find his parents. His name was unusual, and my brother and I assumed that everyone with our name would be related because of this. He spelled it unusually, and this is also what makes it difficult to find. I would love to know where he came from and be able to trace back further.
His name was Laurence Kushmour and he was supposedly born at sea in 1815. m I think I found a brother, Christopher, who spells it Kushmore. They both died in Philadelphia, PA in the area of Kensington, and both worked in the shipyard. I have seen both gravestones and have taken pictures of them. Laurence had at least 13 children, so has many descendants in the US, who spell the surname either Kushmore or Cushmore. I assume the boat Laurence was born on was coming from Germany to the East Coast, as almost all of my ancestors (and my DNA) are basically from Germany. One bit of oral history suggested Alsace, which was part of Germany at that time. I ave tried at least 14 different ways to spell the surname so that it SOUNDS like my maiden name, but cannot find any satisfactory links either on MyHeritage or Ancestry. Any suggestions?
Thank you,
Joyce Cushmore Bradley
This article ‘Looking at our History: Images 101’ should be printable so it can be passed on to family members. Great information.
‘Never write on the front, or circle a person in a group! Use a tissue paper overlay and write names on that.’…..I inherited a box of 150+ photos dating from ca 1870 to 1940. My grandmother and great-grandmother identified each person with a number on the front and corresponding name on the back. I was annoyed until I realized what a blessing it was to have every person in every photo identified. I removed the numbers when I scanned the photos. I’m always sad to see boxes of unidentified photos in antique stores, lost to the families forever. Thank you Grandma and GG.
Robin G
January 8, 2018
If you get hold of photos in those “magnetic” sticky pages, first copy the whole sheet. I use an Epson flatbed scanner and it’s a workhorse. Then try to lift the photos out gently. Many will fall right off the page. For the ones that won’t, a product called Un-Do is also amazing. Work slowly and carefully. I saved a lot of photos using this, and damaged some too because I didn’t realize they had also been glued onto the magnetic page! For those, I eventually learned to soak the whole page in water which will soften the glue. Lay the wet photo on a fine mesh screen and put some archival plastic on top, and then weight that down to keep the photo from wrinkling. Sometimes just drying it on the mesh is enough. I then sort photos by date (if known or I can guess) or event) and store them in archival envelopes.