Identifying a Photo from Clues in the Image

A couple of years ago I created a family archive using a steamer trunk. You can read about the project here: http://lowebader.blogspot.com/2020/11/journey-51-creating-my-family-archive.html

During that process, I reviewed all the photographs I’d inherited from my parents and grandparents and attempted to identify when and where they were taken and of whom. I was, regrettably, mostly unsuccessful. The majority of the photographs are a mystery. A few, however, revealed their secrets using investigative techniques.

The above photograph is of my father and a baby. I wasn’t 100 percent sure that it was one of my father’s own children, but the scene made it seem likely that it was, so I worked on that assumption. But I didn’t know which child it was. I also didn’t know which year it was. If I knew the year, I could determine the child. If I knew the child, I could determine the year. Without a year or the child’s identity, I would need to use other clues. 

There were three photographs taken of this scene, but unfortunately, all the originals were blurry, and they were those small-scale format photographs from before the 1970s.

I first used my magnifying glass on the images, but the magnification wasn’t enough to reveal significant details on such a small photograph.

To work with the images more easily, I scanned them at the highest resolution possible saving them in TIFF format. TIFF stands for Tag Image File Format and is a computer file used to store raster graphics that contain much more image data than other formats (such as JPEG, BMP, or PNG). If you want the best quality from a scanned photograph, TIFF is your best bet. 

Having acquired scans that would let me zoom in on the images while maintaining as much detail as possible, I set about examining them for clues.

My first clue was the apparent age of my father, who looked to me to be around 30 years old. My eldest sibling was born toward the end of 1948 when my father was 28 1/2. My parents’ next child was born in 1951 when my father was 31. When my parents’ third child was born in 1953, my father was 33 1/2. Each of these seemed possible. 

My second clue was the age of the child. Since the child looked to be at least a few months old, I decided the event must have taken place in 1949 or later. 

My third clue was the clothing my father was wearing. I researched men’s clothing from 1948 onward. The baggy pleated trousers that he was wearing were in style for several years. In fact, fuller pleated trousers were popular by 1940 and continued into the 1960s. Had more characteristics of the clothing been discernible, I might have been able to use those, but they were not. So I moved on to other elements in the image.

The large box in the scene says Heinz. Since the company was founded in 1869 and is still in business today, that was not going to help me narrow down the time period. The smaller box seems to have a word that starts with “GR” on the front, but the other words are too blurry to identify. Another dead end.

The newspaper in the photograph seemed to be my last hope. The header quite obviously read “The Province.” Regrettably, closer examination revealed that the date of the edition was obscured. The one potential clue was what was on the newspaper. After much study I believed that the first word in the headline that was visible was perhaps “Austria” or “Australia.” Since newspapers.com has digital editions of The Province online, I began searching for articles that mentioned Australia in 1949 onward. There were many, and I had to look at each one. But since I could see the layout of the publication, I was able to check each item in the search results quickly and eliminate those that didn’t match the look of the page.

I started with the spring of 1949 based on the fact that they were outdoors on a picnic. But I wasn’t even sure that was the correct year. If it were the second or third child, the photograph could have been taken years later. Was I really going to have to check every article with Austria or Australia in the headline that had been published in The Province over several years? I was just beginning to despair when the following appeared on my screen.

The newspaper was dated 5 July 1949. The temperature was 68F or 20C — perfect weather for a picnic.

If the images had been less-blurry, identification would have been easier. But even without clear details, I was still able to solve the mystery of when the event happened and thus determine which child was with my father.