ILLUSTRATING YOUR FAMILY STORY
ILLUSTRATING YOUR family’s history
Simon Wills considers why you might want to look for images to enhance the telling of your genealogy journey – and where you might find some of the pictures you need
Simon Wills
Elizabeth FitzGerald, Countess of Kildare,
c.1684, by Willem Wissing
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In genealogy it’s certainly true that the right illustrations may be the best way to evoke a former era and can save a very long and potentially inaccurate description. Many of us are lucky enough to have private family images of some of our ancestors but there will be many gaps, and few people have any portraits before the mid-19th century. Yet images can serve many purposes apart from showing us what our direct ancestors looked like: they can ‘bring alive’ an event, place or character. Maybe you can find an illustration of the church where your ancestors married even though it has since been pulled down, an old street map of your family’s town, pictures of the clothes they might have worn, or a disaster in which they were caught up.
However, recognising that you’d like some images is one thing; finding them is another matter! There is also the issue of copyright, with which genealogists need to be familiar. You can’t necessarily just search the internet, download any images that you like and use them for any purpose.
Commercial use of Images
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May 2023
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