Have you ever wanted to know the date when a particular photograph of your ancestors was taken?
Jayne Shrimpton is the leading expert to help you.
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Archive for Photo Restoration
Ancestry.com is a leading platform for exploring family history and genealogy, providing a variety of benefits that make it a top choice for individuals wanting to discover their roots.
You can currently have a 14 day free trial so you can see how useful it is for yourself. CLICK HERE
Here are the 15 most compelling reasons for using Ancestry.com:
1. Extensive Historical Records
Ancestry.com boasts billions of records, including birth, marriage, death, census, immigration, military, and more.
The platform provides access to records from numerous countries, making it easier to trace international family connections.
2. User-Friendly Interface
The website is easy to navigate, making it simple for users, even beginners, to start building their family trees and accessing historical data.
Step-by-step hints and suggestions help guide users in finding relevant information without feeling overwhelmed.
3. DNA Testing Services
DNA provides users with an ethnicity breakdown, offering insights into their genetic origins and heritage.
The service connects users with potential relatives based on shared DNA, helping to uncover extended family members and new branches of the family tree.
4. Family Tree Building Tools
The platform offers tools to create detailed family trees that can include photos, stories, and historical records.
Users can collaborate with family members to build and expand their family tree together.
5. Record Hints and Smart Matches
Ancestry.com suggests potential matches and relevant records for individuals in your family tree, simplifying the research process.
This feature helps users quickly discover new information and verify their research with confidence.
6. Educational Resources and Guidance
Ancestry.com offers tutorials, articles, and videos to help users become more proficient in genealogical research.
Users can join forums and groups to get advice and share discoveries with others interested in genealogy.
7. Integration with Historical Context
The platform provides background information on historical events and trends relevant to specific time periods, giving users a richer understanding of their ancestors’ lives.
Maps, old photographs, and newspaper clippings enhance the storytelling aspect of family history.
8. Mobile App Access
The Ancestry mobile app allows users to continue their research from anywhere, making it convenient to access records and update family trees.
Users can scan and upload family photos directly from their smartphones, preserving them digitally.
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Ancestry.com allows users to compile and preserve their family stories, photos, and documents in one secure place for future generations.
Family trees can be shared with loved ones, ensuring that the collected history is passed down and enjoyed by the entire family.
10. Comprehensive Subscription Plans
Ancestry.com offers various subscription levels, allowing users to choose plans that fit their research needs and budget.
Higher-tier plans provide more extensive access to global records and databases.
11. Access to Original Documents
Users can view original documents and historical images, making the research experience more authentic and trustworthy.
Seeing the actual records can help verify details and provide deeper insights into family history.
12. Support for Adopted Individuals
Ancestry.com can be particularly helpful for those trying to find biological family members through DNA testing and shared matches.
The platform can aid in providing information that leads to emotional closure or a deeper understanding of personal heritage.
13. Continuous Updates and Expansions
Ancestry.com frequently updates its databases and adds new records, ensuring that users have access to the most comprehensive data possible.
The platform invests in improving its tools and features to enhance user experience and research capabilities.
14. Family Stories and Memoirs
Users can add stories and anecdotes about their relatives, keeping memories alive and connecting generations.
Through these stories, users can learn about family traditions, achievements, and challenges.
15. Trust and Reliability
Ancestry.com is one of the most reputable and widely used genealogy sites, trusted by millions of users for its thoroughness and reliability.
The platform places importance on user privacy and data security, giving users confidence in how their information is handled.
In summary, Ancestry.com provides a comprehensive and engaging way to explore and document family history. Whether for casual interest or deep research, it offers tools and resources that make genealogy accessible and fulfilling.
In Series 3 Episode 5 Sarah Beeny discovers many odd antiques and family heirlooms that have been passed down through generations and decides that the best way to use these findings in their new home is to transform their downstairs cloakroom into a Victorian cupboard of curiosities. That’s where Photographs Forever came in and we were asked to restore some of the deteriorating precious family photographs.
Here’s one as we received it, together with the restored version and below as it appeared actually in situ in the cloakroom.
New Life in the Country is a Channel 4 documentary series starring property expert and TV presenter Sarah Beeny and her family. The show follows Beeny, her husband Graham Swift, and their four sons as they embark on an ambitious project to build a sustainable new home and start a new chapter in the Somerset countryside.
The series documents the Beeny family’s move from London to rural Somerset, where they take on the challenge of building a modern, eco-friendly home on 220 acres of farmland. It captures the highs and lows of creating a new life in the countryside, from construction challenges to the family’s adaptation to a different lifestyle.
The show is a mix of property development, family life, and lifestyle change. It highlights themes of sustainability, self-sufficiency, and the rewards and difficulties of significant life changes.
Throughout the episodes, viewers see various stages of the home’s construction, interior design decisions, and landscaping projects. The show also delves into the family’s day-to-day life, interactions with the local community, and adjustments to country living.
The series has been well-received for its genuine depiction of family life and the beauty of the English countryside. Viewers appreciate Sarah Beeny’s relatable approach and openness about the challenges they face.
Sarah Beeny and Graham Swift’s project reflects their long-held dream of raising their children closer to nature and living a more grounded lifestyle. The documentary provides insights into the balancing act between professional ambition and family priorities.
Overall, New Life in the Country offers an engaging mix of home-building inspiration, personal storytelling, and picturesque rural life that appeals to fans of property shows and lifestyle documentaries.
BBC Morning Live asked Photographs Forever to appear in their Remembrance Day broadcast.
CLICK HERE to see our founder Richard discussing the importance of restoring your photographs. Watch to see our customer Nigel’s reaction to seeing his grandfather’s photo in full colour for the first time.
Here are some more good reasons to get those precious photographs restored:
Preserve Irreplaceable Memories: Old photographs often hold priceless memories of loved ones and significant moments. Restoring them ensures these special memories are kept alive and passed down through generations.
Protect Against Further Damage: Time can be harsh on photographs, causing fading, tears, and discoloration. Restoring them now helps prevent further deterioration and protects them for the future.
Reconnect with Your Family’s Story: Restored photos help keep family history vivid and relatable. They bring stories to life and make it easier for younger generations to connect with their heritage.
Celebrate and Share Special Moments: Bringing photos back to their original glory lets you display them proudly in your home or create gifts that can be shared with family and friends.
Create Lasting Legacies: Restoring and identifying people in your photos ensures that stories and names don’t get lost over time. It’s a beautiful way to honor the past and keep loved ones’ legacies alive.
Enhance Visual Quality: Restoration can bring out details that were previously hard to see, adding clarity and depth to treasured images and allowing you to appreciate them in their full beauty.
Digital Safeguards: Restored photos can be digitized, making it easier to store, share, and back them up so they’re safe from accidents or damage to physical prints.
We quite often are asked to date photographs that we receive.
This is a specialist skill and the person to talk to is Jayne Shrimpton.
Jayne Shrimpton offers a professional service dating and interpreting photographs and artworks for family historians; local history and genealogy groups; historical and art institutions and TV production companies. Jayne’s formal visual training and experience of working across all artistic and photographic media, combined with her extensive fashion history knowledge, has given her a unique skillset, ideal for successfully interpreting historical images. After decades of advising family and local historians and academic researchers, she understands the importance of time and place and can explain each photograph, painting, drawing and silhouette, revealing its historical context.
For more information click here to go to Jayne Shrimpton’s website.
We’d like to share with you the fascinating story of Stephen Raffield, an avid Titanic historian and collector, who came to us last year with a very special photo album. Stephen and his wife had acquired a personal photograph album of John Kempster’s containing unique, never before seen, historic photographs of both Olympic and Titanic ships. The album was headed for being completely dismantled before they stepped in.
Stephen explains, ‘John Kempster joined Harland and Wolff Belfast in 1900, and was appointed as managing director in 1906 in charge of the electrical plant. Kempster became involved in the construction and launch of both Olympic and Titanic. He was also a very keen photographer and, in 2012, an album of photographs taken and developed by him came to light. A lady walked into a Wiltshire auction house and asked if the album she was holding was worth anything. As well as a number of photographs of the Kempster’s family holiday in America in 1911, the album contained stunning, never seen before, photos of Olympic leaving Belfast for her maiden voyage and also the launch of Titanic and her own departure from Belfast for the first and last time. The photographs are of exquisite quality and finely detailed. The initial plan of the auctioneers was to break up the album and sell off the photographs singly or in small batches. Steve and Jane Raffield, collectors of Titanic memorabilia, were able to negotiate the purchase of the whole album so that this unique record of both Olympic and Titanic at Belfast would be preserved for the future.’
Stephen came to us with the Kempster album. We scanned the photos in high definition so that each photograph could be safely stored on Stephen’s computer and was also able to appreciate the greater detail of the enlarged images for the first time!
We went on to digitally enhance, and bring out of the photos even more definition by using modern technology, and removing any imperfections from the photos which Kempster himself had developed and printed. We also re-created the album so Stephen could give replica copies to his children.
“The restored photos are simply stunning. The originals are amazing and I didn’t think you could improve much from what are the most detailed photos in the world of the launch of Titanic. Absolutely amazing!”
The original album, photographs and the rest of the Raffield Titanic Collection are currently on display in Brisbane, Australia.
Going, Going, Gone!
Here is one of the frames we provided showing photographs of the Titanic actually being launched.
It’s very easy to start the process of saving your own precious photos. All you have to do is send us a message!
Production Company Woodcut Media asked Photographs Forever to colourise historic photographs of the construction, launch and life on board the Titanic.
“It’s a story often told in black and white. Now we reveal the ship in its true colours,” says narrator Tracy-Ann Oberman
The Daily Mail previewed the program
‘Incredible new colourised photographs have given an insight into what life was really like on the Titanic.
New Channel 4 documentary Titanic In Colour is airing 4th August, bringing life into the stories of the passengers onboard the famously doomed ship.
The RMS Titanic famously sank on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on 15 April, 1912, with an estimated 2,224 people onboard.
The ‘unsinkable’ ship hit an iceberg just before midnight and as there were only 20 lifeboats onboard, 1,500 people lost their lives.
In the programme, relatives of those onboard tell their untold stories, while colourised photos and film footage gives a unique insight into daily life on the superliner.’
THE DOCUMENTARY CAN BE WATCHED AGAIN VIA THIS LINK
We recently helped David by restoring two fading 1970s photographs of him, one for the front cover of his forthcoming autobiography.
David says:
“Due out in July/August is my autobiography, David Hamilton’s Long And Winding Road, My life, loves and lessons learned, published by Austin Macauley and celebrating my 65th year in broadcasting.
Choosing the right pictures for the front cover is vital and the publishers wanted a Then and Now, a shot of me in my Radio 1 days in the 70`s and one in my Boom Radio studio today.
I had in a frame at home a picture in the Radio 1 studio taken in 1975 that had faded, probably from sunlight. It needed enhancing. I had heard of Photographs Forever through their advertising on Boom Radio. Since I live in West Sussex it wasn’t too long a journey to pay them a visit.
Richard was absolutely brilliant, worked his magic on the photo and here it is, looking as good as new. Well done, Photographs Forever and Thank You.”
We recently restored several images of Norman Wisdom for his son Nick. These were to form part of an exhibition that Nick is mounting.
We restored these two photographs so they could be printed the appropriate size for the framed exhibit of Norman’s suit dating back to 1952.
Nick says:
“As the Norman Wisdom Exhibition reaches its capacity of circa eighty frames, it’s fair to say that the best has been saved to last. A five foot high frame (below) features Norman’s long tailed suit first worn in the theatre in 1952. As ever, thanks must go to the experts who I have come to rely on. Gerald Fleuss, master calligrapher and Richard Haines of Photographs Forever who can resurrect and adapt any form of photography to great effect.”
We were asked by Reigate & Banstead Borough Council to restore 49 faded framed portraits of their Mayors going back many years. This involved removing the existing photographs from their frames, scanning and digitally restoring each one as well as reintroducing all the red and gold elements of many. Here is just one of the worse ones showing before and after our restoration.
When all 49 were fully restored we printed them all on archive grade paper (so the fading will no longer be an issue going forward) and replaced them in their original frames. Here they are safely reinstalled and being regularly enjoyed by all visitors the the Town Hall.
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