This website is dedicated to those photographers who preserved the faces of ancestors I never knew and captured events that happened long before my birth.  They worked with equipment that could never take the shots I enjoy snapping, with chemistry rather than computers, and they created photographic images with greater life expectancies than today's digital prints.

The first photograph was taken some time before my great-great grandmother died in 1869.  It is a digital copy of a "tintype".

The two studio portraits from the late 1800s and 1905 were shot either by available light or by flash powder. In the late 1880s it was discovered that magnesium powder, if mixed with an oxidising agent such as potassium chlorate, could be easily ignited.  This led to the introduction of flash powder, which was spread on a metal dish and set off by sparks from a flint wheel, electrical fuse or just by applying a match. 

The photograph of the cabin interior at night in 1931 was shot with flash powder, not by a professional photographer, but by my father.

The photo of my mother, Evelyn Andrus, was taken by a newspaper photographer.  At that time she was the Rochester, NY, Women's City Speed Skating Champion.

Thanks to those photog's of the past, and special thanks to my cousin Roseanne for finding the portraits of Polly and Jonathan and for sharing them with me.