Holiday Photo Captions - What to do

The day after my mother died I looked for a photo of her to place on the table of my home during the funeral prayers, plus another couple of photos for an obituary to go on line whilst she was still fresh in my memory and I could get information from my father. He was in his late eighties and I wasn't sure he would survive more than a year. My father gave me a shoe box of family photos. Some of them were carefully labelled with the date, just the year they were taken, but most had no date. I wrote the names of the people and the dates and places. I was able to identify total strangers met once on holiday, from dear aunts.

I then went to my mother in law's home and did the same with her box of family photos which were even more of a mystery to me. I had a hard job distinguishing baby photos of my husband from baby photos of his brother, and indeed baby photos of their son and ours. Now that both of my parents have passed away and my mother in law has Alzheimer's I have records which would otherwise be lost. Not only do I have photos, but I have essential dates. When the probate office wants to know the date of the death of my father, I don't need to hunt through my files, I can pick up ay photo of my father and check the back. When I write up a family history and want to know the date my parents married - I always knew it was during WWII, I can check the exact year in an instant. One photo in my family album remains a mystery. The date is about 1910. But who are the bride and groom? The other members of the family? The relatives, the neighbours, and where is it? The garden of a small terraced house, probably London's East End. If only the photographer and family had written the names of the bride and groom and all the others. I might have saved hours of time and money trying to trace my family history. I might have the missing photo of a great grandmother. Or even a great great grandmother. And our son's great, great, great grandmother. I shall have to wait until the time when facial recognition becomes a standard tool and online photo comparison becomes so accessible and easy that I can just load up up a family photo and get back suggestions as to who the people were.

I wrote an article saying that you should label the back of all your wedding photos for the benefit of your grandchildren because by the time they are teenagers and interested in genealogy, your parents may have passed away, and though you know your parents from your in-laws. It's very handy to keep the groom's parents beside or behind him in photos, and the bride's beside or behind her, for identification later, apart from any sense of orderliness and protocol. Having instructed everybody else to label their family wedding photos, I looked at my own wedding photos and of course I had not labelled them. Now, you will be glad to know, I have followed my own advice.

It's also useful to label all holiday photos.

When wondering what to put on labels start with the simple and obvious. You know you've just come back from a holiday in France. But in years to some one cathedral in Europe looks like another and you won't know whether it is France of Belgium. Likewise photos of Asian countries. If you know whether a Chinese temple is in China or Singapore, you'll have more chance of tracking it down quickly on line.

If you can, answer all the W questions, who, where, what, why? You know the place where you married. But will you remember in ten years time? Your children won't remember. It's so easy to fill in these details at the time. Even names of people on holiday photos. The morning after you can work out, with the aid of friends, who was who. Very handy with meeting business contacts, too, to be able to enquire after somebody's wife, named Sally, or colleague, John.

Lost and Found Clothes

That photo of you in your new baseball cap is handy when you go to lost and found to ask if they have it, to remind them and prove it's yours. Likewise the navy blue swimming costume left behind in the changing room at the club - after you say you've lost a blue costume and they say they don't have it because at night it looks black - but your photo with the brand name triggers their memory and they produce it from a drawer. Your luggage lost at the airport or missing in transit, or in a huge store at the hotel after a coachload of people arrive and leave black cases. Easier to find it. If you claim on insurance or against the airline and have to fill in a form you can work out the size of the case, recall whether it was hard or soft sided, two or four wheels, old or brand new and the brand name.