I have in my possession a Victorian Album of photographs.

It dates from shortly after the death of Queen Victoria and belonged to my grandparents, coming to me through my mother, whose parents they were. I have known the album since my childhood.

I had some of the photographs identified to me, as a child, by my mother but some of them she herself didn't know as they were relatives of her grandparents on both sides and date from the 1860s. So some of them I know, some of their names I've forgotten and some of them I've never known.

In 2004, however, when trawling the internet after I'd discovered a previously unknown middle name on a birth certificate, I found a connection to a third cousin I was unaware of and found that she had in her possession one of the photographs in my album.

Furthermore, she knew the identities of all the people in it (they were the brother, wife and children of my great grandfather). I had other photographs of the family which I was able to give her in return.

It seemed, therefore, that since, even more than now, photographs were then distributed to keep in touch with distant members of a family, it was likely that other copies of those held by me might still be out there.

This site is my attempt to find the people who have them and to find out what our connections are.

The music that introduces some of my ancestors is from the music box in the back of the album.Thanks to the efforts of my aforementioned cousin, Kathleen Elliott, I now know that it is the chorus from an 1895 song called The Sunshine of Paradise Alley.

For this information we are both indebted to Robbie Rhodes at http://mmd.foxtail.com/Sounds/ and to Richard Dutton of West Orange, New Jersey. See his MMD articles indexed at
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/ Authors/Aut1153.html