This is the very first photo I scanned when I started off the project, during an Ohio trip in the summer of 2016. Lately I’ve been learning and practicing with Photoshop skills so I can make images look better and begin the phase of editing, processing, and by way of this website — SHARING!

Some of the best fun lies in discovering identities and connections of these people and places and times gone by. And I knew from photo 1 that some of these would be challenging! There are 29 people to identify in this family portrait and it was not labeled. Luckily, the internet — especially ancestry.com — has the data and clues to put it all together. I want to walk you through the steps I went through to figure out who all of these people were.

You look at the photo and your eyes are drawn to the center — you find an elderly woman seated and positioned centrally.

She stands out as the elder of the group. This is Eunice Fellows — and it helps to start by identifying who her immediate family was:

I didn’t need to look much further, than photo #2 of my scanning project — the year estimated from age appearances. Here is Eunice, age 41-42yrs seated on the bottom right, with the other end flanked by her husband, John Dague, age 43-44yrs. In between, we find their family of 7 children.

• Back row: Charlotte, age 18-19 years; Orland 11-12 years; Jesse 9-10 years; Melvin 15-16 years
• Front row: Carrie, age 3-4 years; Burt 5-6 years; Cora 20-21 years

In part 2, we’ll advance in time to when these children were adults with their own young families. See you tomorrow…