Costume historian & photo-dating expert Jayne Shrimpton shares advice to help you date your unidentified pictures and so put names to the faces of the past
Your family photos
Natasha Ellakirk writes:
My great-grandmother, Mollie, had this photo on her mantelpiece during her lifetime and a scan was recently sent to me by relatives. I’m told the original is 3ins x 3½ins and seems stuck directly to glass. Nobody in the family knows the gentleman’s identity for sure, so I’d like to know whether any clues can identify him. We believe he is one of Mollie’s great-grandfathers, so there are four contenders: John Morrison (c18001861); Donald Morrison (c1817–1885); Ewan Maclean (c1791–1868); and Donald Maclean (c1792–1861).
We have cautiously estimated the date to be c1860s (though are fully prepared to be proven wrong). Three of the four contenders died around this time, when aged in their 60s and 70s. To my eyes, at least, the gentleman in the photo looks younger, so I am leaning towards Donald Morrison as the most likely candidate. Donald was in his 40s in the 1860s.
The photo was likely taken in the Outer Hebrides as all four men were from the Isles of Lewis and North Uist. I notice the gentleman has a flower in his lapel. Dressed for a wedding perhaps? His daughter, Bell, did get married in 1861, but a photo just of the father of the bride seems a little unusual. Donald married his second wife in 1857, so perhaps then he is pictured here as groom?
While we may never know for sure who he is, it is a fabulous photo and wonderful to have one from so long ago. He was important to Mollie: it’s such a shame she isn’t here to ask, but with an accurate date I can approach history societies in the Western Isles to see whether anyone can help me further. Someone may even have seen this image before.
Jayne Shrimpton replies:
This certainly is a super family portrait created over 160 years ago when photography was still in its infancy. A one-off photograph called a wet collodion positive or ambrotype, this essentially comprises the original glass plate negative turned into an apparently positive image by blackening one side of the glass. Usually set into a plain or chased metal (brass or pinchbeck) surround or ‘mat’/‘matte’, as here, fragile ambrotypes were often cased or framed. Those posed formally in the photographer’s studio, like this example, only enjoyed a brief heyday between the mid to late 1850s and early 1860s, being rapidly superseded by card-mounted cartes de vi
