Family Photographs for Genealogists

Portraits, Family Gatherings, Christenings...

These are all important items to keep and digitize wherever possible and NAME everyone in the photograph! In 10 years, 20 years whose going to know who they are or remember names? This is one of the most often things we hear at the Heritage & Research Help Desk, "this photo was taken sometime in the 1920,s or 1890,s  Mum/Dad are gone/cannot remember their names".

Family is how we figure out who we are and where we came from, and increasingly this means genealogy research is becoming our only way to find out especially as family members grow older and forget or in some cases choose not to pass on the family stories. With Ancestry.com and other genealogy resources growing bigger and better and privacy laws changing it means we now have access to millions of records from all over the world.

Family photographs are often lost or destroyed through house fires, floods and other natural disasters so now is the time to record these for future generations. There are many technology tools available to save these precious items, here are just a few...

• Use your smartphone as a scanner and save the image to the Cloud or pen drive, read this blog post by Dick Eastman for more ideas. Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• Scan to email at your local library Rotorua Library Services
• Use a digital camera and download all photographs to an external hard drive or USB, from there you can pay an online Photograph Book service such as SnapFish, Diamond Photo or PhotoBox, there are many to choose from, and this allows you to share with family via a password secured service or printed copy of the book.
• Use genealogy software to record your family tree. Again there are lots to choose from, a great resource to figure out which one is best see Eastman's Blog or Cyndi's List

• DON'T put precious photographs on Facebook or other social media, because when you read their fine print conditions you will find they own the digital image and can do what they or anyone on the WWW want to do with it.

Alan Lord kindly allowed Rotorua Library to add this photograph to
our online archive Kete Rotorua

Any one of the people in the photograph could be You! or your parents, brothers, sisters, cousins. Kete Rotorua and DigitalNZ are safe repositories for photographs like this one as they are secure sites which always give the copyright owners their rightful place.

Rotorua has had many professional photographers and here are a few that allowed their images, mostly weddings, engagements and coming of age photographs, to be published in the Rotorua Photo News 1963-1971.

Arawa Studios - Michael Burton
Bachelor Photographics - Alan Wilkinson
Camera Craft - Unknown
Fenwick Photographers - Peter Fenwick
Rotorua Home Portraits - Wyn Lambert
Michael's Portraits -  Mick Coebergh, Richard Krall & Russell Robinson
Modern Age Photography - Richard Krall
People Publishing Studios - B.J. O'Neill

Charles E. Jones ; Clarke Mahoney ; Louis Edwards ; Jack Lang as well as lots and lots of proud Mum's and Dad's  :)

The Rotorua Photo News can be viewed in the Heritage & Research area of Rotorua Library.