About three years ago I set myself the challenge of creating a digital library of every old family photo my brother and I inherited. The plan was to photograph the originals, using a good digital SLR camera. This is done with the soft natural light from a typically British all-over white sky, the sort of sky that manages to be bright whilst casting no shadow. The photos are then cleaned up digitally to remove scratches, perhaps enhance colour, and so on, and saved with an appropriate title. Sometimes an image takes five minutes to process, sometimes much, much longer. I still have a long way to go.

It’s a sad reality we family historians often have to come to terms with, that not everyone in our family is as interested in our ancestors as we are… My plan is to share these digital images with every family member, but I realise that no matter how much work I put into them, they’re unlikely to ignite the interest of the rest of the family, much less transport them back to the time the photo was taken and make them wonder what was going on in the subject’s world, as I would, and I suspect everyone reading this would too. Because of this, my grand plan has always been to present them in chronological order and meaningful ‘categories’, like photos of my parents before they knew each other, photos of my brother and me as children, and so on.

As I work with these photos I spend so much time looking at them that I spot details others would likely miss. I work out which photos were taken on the same day, spot the ‘stories’ in them, and assign dates – some deduced with forensic certainty, while others are estimates based on the clues. I then give each image a title with dates, names, and location or event.

I know that this is probably not enough to keep the attention of someone who hasn’t been bitten with the genealogy bug, so the plan is to provide each family member with not only the individual images, but also the same images in a digital booklet, creating the focus for a short history about that person or those people. I hope that in the context of their wider story the photos will make more sense.

My plan was disrupted when I borrowed all my brother’s photos and had to prioritise photographing them so I could get them back to him. In consequence, although I have around 400 processed old family images in my digital photo library (and about the same number photographed and awaiting processing), I haven’t produced even one ‘complete’ batch/story of photos for family members. I feel the need to achieve some sort of milestone.

Just before Christmas I went to the Christmas concert of our town’s brass band. As I listened to the beautiful arrangements of many of my favourite carols, my mind turned to my Granddad who, from 1906 until 1920, was a musician in the Green Howards, or Yorkshire Regiment.

He seems to have had that role from the outset. Certainly by the time he sent a Christmas card from South Africa to his parents in 1907, his title was ‘Drummer’. How he came to be so is a mystery to me. I’m sure he couldn’t have had previous experience, and can only assume he had a very good natural sense of rhythm, expressed an interest in specialising in the military band, and somehow was given a drum, some drumsticks and a mentor, and left to practise. He did it for fourteen years, and we still have his beautifully carved drumsticks and pacing stick.

After the brass band concert I got out all my Granddad’s photos and memorabilia from his time in the Green Howards, I realised there were not that many – no more than forty or fifty – and even though I haven’t yet photographed or processed a single one of them, I decided to make this the first of my little histories. After all, I already know a fair bit about his military movements.

As is evident from the image at the top of this post, not all the photos are great. That image is just a quick photo taken on my phone to illustrate the blogpost; the one I’ll take later on my camera will be better quality. However, the original is very small (2″ x 3 1/4″ / 5cm x 9cm), and with this slight enlargement, the image of the men is blurred. I can improve on this but not much. However, it has value as the only photo I have of the band in ‘marching’ mode and will sit alongside better images of them in seated format.

So this is part of my ToDo List for the next couple of months: to photograph, digitise and, as far as possible, arrange all my Granddad’s army images in date order with locations, and to share this with family. A second stage will be to find out as much as I can about the Battalion’s reason for being in the various locations, but that will be on a future ToDo List.