What’s the first thing you would grab if you had to quickly leave your home due to a disaster? For many people, that answer is the old family photos. If you happen to have lost your family photos, there is potential that you might find them online at one of these websites.
It would be a tragedy to lose your old family photos. You might only have one copy of them, and they are irreplaceable. What can you do if you have lost some of your family photos? There is the potential that they may pop up somewhere online. Here are a few websites that you can start your search with.
Ancestry.com has a collection of high school yearbooks. The collection includes around 35,000 yearbooks. They were published between 1884 and 2009. This could be a great place to start for genealogists who have a subscription to Ancestry.com, and who are searching for high school photos of their relatives and ancestors.
Ancient Faces has over 104,000,000 records online. It is a free family history community for sharing vintage photos and family history. You can use this website to do a genealogy search. Or, you can select from one of several photo tags if you wanted to look at a specific collection. Some of these tags include: 1700’s, 1800’s, 1900’s, 1910’s, 1930’s, 1940’s. 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1960’s Hippie Culture. Genealogists might also want to check out the “Lost” category.
Did you lose your camera when you went on your family vacation? Maybe someone found it. There is a website called “ifoundyourcamera.net”. It features some of the photos that were on cameras that someone lost, (and that were found by strangers).
Scan through the website. Your lost photos might be on there, somewhere. If you don’t see them, you can post a quick description of where you were when you lost your camera. There are some success stories on the blog that talk about people who were reunited with their lost photos.
Lost Photos of Joplin, MO Tornado is the name of a Facebook page. The page was put together in an effort to preserve and return photos and other personal property that was lost in the tornado that hit Joplin, Mississippi. There is a Flickr account associated with this group.
The Olive Tree Genealogy has a page called “Lost Faces”. It is a collection of old family photos that came from antique auctions, stores, flea markets, and garage sales. Some of them go as far back as the 1800’s. Genealogists who find a photo of one of their ancestors in the collection can contact the person who is posting the collection. You might be able to obtain a quality photographic reproduction of the photo.
Look At Me is a tumblr site that is a collection of old photos. There aren’t any details about the individual photos, and they are placed randomly on the page. This might be fun for genealogists who enjoy looking at old family photos (even if they aren’t related to the people in them).
Image by Lee Cannon on Flickr