One of the things I find occasionally mentioned in the gossip columns of the weekly newspapers published where my family lived are references to trips they took to visit out-of-town relatives or times when out-of-town relatives came to visit.
I decided that it might be a good idea to keep a spreadsheet of these trips (with columns for who travelled, when, where, source of trip information, and miscellaneous details). Why spend time doing this? Because these trips are often when photographs get taken and knowing who visited whom and when may help with some of that photo identification.
And who knows what else it may help with?
2 Responses
What a good idea! Yes, you are right that trips often provide photos of family members who lived at distances & wouldn’t regularly be seen. We have some mystery photos on our family collection, one of a set of great-grandparents with a great great uncle as a child & 4 other people, all youngish adults, who we have never been able to identify.
I have put together trips that my parents took us on and then trips that I have taken with others. One trip to Ontario and Quebec that we went on I had no idea of the year. But I remembered that we saw a show in Toronto with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. I contacted the some people there and they gave me two or three choices. That allowed me to figure out which year it must have been.
As far as ancestors, some family member cut out snippets of my great grandfather’s travels and glued them onto a sheet of paper. Unfortunately they cut off all of the dates so that no timeline can be put together.