There is a large archive of family photographs that is completely free but can be hard to find. It holds photos of ordinary people going back more than a century. People who may be in your family tree.
This article walks you through a step-by-step method of searching for photos relevant to you and your ancestors.
To make your research easier, I’ve put all the tips and search terms in this article into a two page cheat sheet. Details on how to get it are at the end of this article.
Video Version
If you prefer visual content, this same material is in our YouTube tutorial.
Why Ancestor Photos Are Challenging
Finding photos of the people in your tree is a challenge, and there’s a simple reason. These photos were taken by individuals, not institutions. They’re sitting in albums and shoeboxes in attics, not in a searchable database.
Up to now, you’ve probably found photos through three sources.
- Family tree uploads where someone else builds their tree and uploads photos attached to specific people. If they’ve made them public, you get lucky.
- Obituaries and memorials on sites like FindAGrave and BillionGraves. Now and then someone has attached a photo or a newspaper clipping with an image.
- Historic newspapers. Even when your ancestors weren’t notable, local papers can have pictures of people attending a dance. But this is usually a separate subscription on top of your standard genealogy one.
Those three are worth using. But if that’s all you’ve tried, you’ve been missing a fourth source that’s every bit as rich, and it’s free.
The Fourth Source: Facebook Hometown Groups
Scattered across Facebook are groups dedicated to the local history and nostalgia of a particular town. One group for one small town can hold thousands of scans, posted over ten years or more.
Take Westfield in Union County, New Jersey. It’s a town of about 30,000 people today. I found four Facebook groups holding photos from right across the 20th century.
Someone uploads a batch of old pictures, mentions a relative in one of them, and the group takes it from there. People start naming the other faces. They name the shop owners. They swap stories about the folks in the photo.
There’s a back and forth of “does anybody remember so-and-so?”. Someone chimes in with where the family lived.
Comments Are Rich in Information
But the photos are only part of the prize. The photo gives you a face. The comments can break down your brick walls.
Here’s why they’re so valuable. The people commenting are often in their seventies and eighties. They’re recognizing people they knew back in their twenties, and those people were in their sixties at the time.
Follow that math and you’re potentially getting photos and stories about people born in the early 1900s. That knowledge isn’t written down anywhere else, and it won’t be around forever.
Verify, Verify, Verify!
A word of caution, which is nothing new in family tree research. We can generally trust people’s memories when it comes to neighbors, names and neighborhoods. But stories grow in the telling.
Treat everything you find here as a lead, not a fact. And be particularly careful with faces. Siblings get mixed up with each other. I’ve even seen a father and son confused, because the person commenting was a little unsure of the year.
Take the names, then confirm them against census returns, vital records and directories before you attach anything to your tree.
With that understood, these groups are still an amazing resource. The real problem is finding them and then finding the pictures inside them.
The groups are scattered with no proper index, and Facebook’s own search is famously poor.
So you need a method. Here it is, in three steps.
Step 1: Find the groups
Start on Facebook and switch your search over to Groups so you’re not wading through everything else.
You’re hunting for groups dedicated to local history in a particular place. The good news is they tend to have very similar names. So you search for the likely names one at a time.
Using Westfield as the example, I run searches like:
- Old Westfield New Jersey
- Growing up in Westfield New Jersey
- Westfield New Jersey nostalgia
- Westfield New Jersey then and now
- Memories of Westfield New Jersey
- You know you’re from Westfield New Jersey if
Run each one as its own separate search. The full checklist of naming patterns is on page one of the cheat sheet.
One note. Some groups are named just “Old Westfield” with no state anywhere in the title. The state is usually in the group’s description or location, so the search often finds them anyway. But if a phrase turns up nothing, drop the state and run it again before you decide there’s no group.
Watch out for false positives
When I search Westfield, one of the results is a group called “You know you’re from Garfield, NJ when.”
Garfield isn’t Westfield. You might think it’s at least close, but it isn’t. It’s 26 miles away in a different county, and back in the day that was a long way.
The only reason it shows up at all is that it shares “field” with Westfield. So always check the county and state before you get excited.
Widen the net
That false positive points at something real, though. You genuinely do want the towns nearby. Families moved between neighboring towns constantly for work, church and marriage, and sometimes they moved back.
A person who was born and died in one town might have spent twenty adult years working in the next one over.
So widen your search outward, and just look at a map to guide you.
For me, with this branch, I’d start with the town of Elizabeth, because marriage and death records tell me the family spread there. I replace Westfield with Elizabeth and run the exact same searches.
If your target place is too small to have its own group, the people from there will most likely be posting in the county group. For Westfield, that’s Union County, so I run the searches again with Union in place of the town.
Depending on the lives and occupations of your ancestors, you could try alumni groups, church groups, or fire department groups in the area.
Joining the groups
Most of these groups are private, so you’ll need to hit Join. Many of them ask a screening question, which I think is mostly to keep the bots out. One honest line usually does it.
Keep it simple and true. Something like: “Researching family who lived here from the 1890s to the 1960s.”
Step 2: Search inside each group
Once you’re in, every group has its own search box, and this is where the real digging happens. Page two of the cheat sheet lays all of this out, but here are the essentials.
Start with surnames, but don’t stop there. Run the misspellings too. People typing captions from memory can really mangle a name, and Facebook’s search takes you literally.
Search for women under both their maiden and married surnames, because they vanish from surname searches the moment they marry.
Next, get addresses from your census returns and city directories, and search the street. You can turn up street scenes with the family home in them even when nobody names the family.
Search the full address and the street name on its own. If you know the neighborhood name, try that too, because locals often used it instead of the street.
For a specific person, target the high school with their likely graduating year. That’s roughly the birth year plus eighteen. Try the local elementary schools as well. School photos are one of the richest sources of named faces you’ll find.
Then search employers and shop names. Photos of shop fronts almost always come with a thread of people naming everyone standing in the doorway. Try local events too, and for American towns add Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
Catch-all
And finally, a few generic catch-all terms:
- old photos
- found photos
- photo album
- shoebox
These pull up the posts where someone has announced a batch of inherited pictures that nobody in the family can identify. You might be the one who can put a name to a face.
Step 3: Make it a habit
This isn’t a one-and-done job. A couple of things to build in.
Re-run your searches. In a busy group, try again every few months. In a smaller one, the end of the year is a good bet, because Christmas is when people are reminiscing and, just as importantly, physically visiting family homes and getting into the actual attics and shoeboxes.
Keep a log of which terms you’ve already run in which group. It saves you repeating yourself, and it makes those periodic re-runs quick.
Don’t rely only on search. Facebook’s search doesn’t always surface what’s there, and sometimes a result you found before won’t come up again with the same words. So go into the group’s Photos tab and scroll it all the way back. When an image grabs your eye, open it and read the comments.
And save what you find. Because results can be hard to reproduce, grab the post URL, download the image, and screenshot the comments while they’re in front of you.
Grab the cheat sheet
My free cheat sheet lays out everything above as a two page checklist you can print and work through town by town.
It has the full list of group-name patterns, the in-group search terms, and a group log to fill in.
You get it as a PDF when you use this link to subscribe to my newsletter.
