Using Bank Records to Identify Old Photographs

There are a great many old collections produced by commercial photographers, with prints, negatives, or both, that sadly consist of unidentified images. No persons’ names, no dates or subject matter, no locations, building identifications, or the occasions on which the images were taken, nor even print or negative numbers designated by the photographer. Photos taken from much before the middle of the 20th century probably cannot be identified through the memories of living persons. Crowdsourcing identifications may help. Doubtless many will never be identified. Some may remain identifiable, however, through unorthodox means. This may even soon include through facial recognition software.

Even more far-out possibilities present themselves. One of these is the use of banking records in the identification of old photographs. For this to become possible, however, several unlikely outcomes would have to align. A collection of negatives or prints would need to be from the same studio, and the studio would need to be known or identifiable. The collection should be maintained in the consecutive arrangement adopted by the photographer, preferably chronological.

The names of the photographers would need to be known. Research should first be undertaken to identify all of the photographers who plied their trade in the towns or cities in question. This can be done in many places through the use of city directories, combined with newspaper advertisements. Statewide business directories should also not be overlooked. For the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, “local items” columns in the newspapers also should not be ignored.

The banking records that would be needed are ledgers that chronicle activity by account holder. If such ledgers include records of the deposits made by commercial photographers, personal checks should be individually itemized. Such records can yield a roughly chronological record of the photographer’s customers who paid by check (many probably did). If the images in the collection are also filed chronologically, then certain key images may be identifiable by a cross-dating process analogous to that used in dendrochronology. Once a sufficient number of key images have been cross-dated, then the approximate dates of other images can be interpolated.

A studio’s chief output often was portrait photography. With such work, key images may turn out to be those large family groups with several children, which might be matched to the chronological customer list through a comparison with census records, by matching groups of children, both by sex and by the differences in their ages. Such identifications, however, while they would have no direct bearing on building photos, may help provide needed date markers by which to bracket the dates of the photographer’s architectural or landscape subjects.

Other key images may be construction progress photos of public buildings, especially as they near completion. If the buildings themselves can be identified, it may be a simple matter to find a record of the year of their completion or of their dedication dates. Contractors often made arrangements with a commercial photographer to take these photos. If an entire series of such photos chronicles the construction of a building from groundbreaking to completion, the spacing between the photos, in a chronological sequence, would bracket the dates of the images that occur between them.

Dated photos of more obscure buildings can be compared to the chronological list from the banking records. Likely possibilities can be checked against city directories to find street addresses, which might then be checked against Sanborn maps, for example, or against fire insurance surveys. Late-nineteenth-century bird’s-eye views or twentieth-century, low-level, oblique aerial photos may provide other imagery helpful for confirmation.

The Paterson [NJ] Museum, for example, is one institution making strong efforts to identify the images in a collection of 8,000 glass plate negatives that it holds. A video describing their progress can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTlb3xvJMqY. Information about other institutions and their identification efforts will be welcome, and especially so if they have found the use of banking records helpful.

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