One of my favourite hobbies would have to be colouring old photos. To put some colour into the cheeks of an image over 100 years old suddenly brings them to life and lets you see them in a whole new (colourful) light.
I use Adobe Photoshop to colour them, each colour is a separate layer. With up-close portraits I use a combination of colours for the skin; the usual flesh and blush tone, but also blues, yellows and even greens!
When I first started, it was landscapes that caught my fancy, especially streetscapes of my hometowns of Perth and Fremantle.
Corner of Wellington & Barrack Street, Perth, c.1906
But when I started on portraits, especially those of my ancestors, it was truly amazing to be able to see them in a new way. Just adding colour seemed to give them a more multidimensional texture that also gave a feeling of knowing them just that little bit better.
Last week I was working on a distant line in my tree that centred around a notable figure, Rowland Taylor. Now Rowland himself is an interesting man. He was born in Northumberland in 1510, growing up under the reign of Henry VIII who separated from Rome forming the Church of England (only so he could divorce his wife and marry another).
Rowland went into the Ministry and became quite a popular pastor who tended the poor and believed in strong family foundations. But when Henry VIII’s successor, son Edward died young, the crown ended up in the hands of Queen Mary who quickly reverted the country back to Catholicism.
Sally’s Fremantle Memoirs Sarah Agnes (Sally) Hundt (nee Mocken), provided by her daughter Robyn.
Sally with her mother, Florence
I was born on a bright summer’s morning according to my mother’s autograph book, July 19th, 1921. Ten pounds in weight and named Sarah Agnes. According to Mum, she told Dad to name me Hazel Rosemary but Dad, who till the day he died I’d never seen affected by liquor, got drunk with his shipmates on the way to the birth registry, couldn’t remember Mum’s names so named me after his eldest sister and his mother. I was always and still to this day, called Sally.
My Grandmother lived on the corner of Nairn & Market Street and we lived in a cottage on Collie Street, no. 22, now an estate agency.
In those days, 1921-1941, all around Collie, Nairn, Essex and Marine Parade (Terrace), there was a polyglot of nationalities; Italians, Yugoslavs, Portuguese, Germans, English, no Asians – white Australian policy was enforced then I believe. There was a Japanese laundry in Bannister Street and two Chinese fruit & vegetable shops in South Terrace though.
An Italian family, named Vinci, lived in 20 Collie Street and when they moved the Gumina’s came to live there. In 23, a Greek family named Anastas lived, in 26, another Italian family, the Rottendellas – red headed or as the Italians say titian headed. No. 26 is now a restaurant.
Next door to my Gran in Market Street was a wonderful Italian lady, Mamma Migliore. Mamma had seven sons and always yearned for a daughter. When she eventually had a daughter after 17 years the daughter was stillborn and Mamma died. Tony, one of her sons, was a very dear friend of mine till he died a couple of years ago. He was born a month after me and we always kept in touch through the years.
Mamma spoilt me rotten. Always, when I came down to Gran’s from Boulder, inviting me into dinner where huge servings of spaghetti was put in front of me and much pinching of the cheeks and ‘mia bellos!’ was the order of the day.
I’d like to bring to your attention, the story of one Grace Ellen Vernon Bussell and the family’s stockman, Sam Yebble Isaacs, the son of a Native American mariner and a local Wardandie tribe mother.
While they’re not part of my family tree, the Bussell family are intertwined with mine, the first of their family arrived at the Swan River Colony with my great-great-great grandfather, John Foss Tonkin, on the ship Warrior, in 1830.
This story is about the heroic, brave actions of this young girl and the stockman who worked for her father. They lived on a large property in what is now part of the Margaret River area while the nearby town of Busselton is named after the prominent family.
It’s a pretty common stereotype and sometimes an attempted insult to us Australians to say that crime is in our DNA because Australia was settled by Convicts. But I don’t see what they’re trying to get at as I’m proud to have one in my tree! It’s Australian royalty!
For the record, not all settlers to Australia were convicts and the majority that were deported Down Under went to Tasmania or New South Wales. The Swan River colony started out as a free settlement and they tried very hard to keep it that way, but by 1850 they soon realised they were in dire need of cheap labour to build up the place. Over the next 18 years, nearly 10,000 convicts were dumped on our shores, but it allowed the WA economy to boom and prosper.
So I checked my familytreeDNA origins results again last night after hearing they’d upgraded their population sample databases and there were some big changes!
Here’s my two to compare, one from last year and now.
Scandinavian has really shot up. Since this seems to be centred around Norway, I would expect a bit from my 2x GGF from the Viking-raided, Outer Hebrides in Scotland, but not this much, especially since I only inherited 19% of his granddaughters DNA! If it includes Danish Vikings then I could have a bit more from the Norfolk area, but still, it seems like a lot!
Annoyed that my Eastern European has dropped off, since that’s my direct maternal line to SW Poland, though it’s possible they had Germanic origins.
British seems quite low. Except for 2x GGP’s from Austro/Italy and Prussia, all my other lines are UK, though I suspect the Western European infiltrated through my Kent and Cornish lines.
South-east Euro has jumped, on other sites I was between 2-7% Mediterranean which seemed about right for my Austro-Italian 2x GGF.
Comparing between the different companies at AncestryDNA and 23andMe shows massive differences so we’re obviously still a fair way off the technology being accurate % wise.
My paper trail estimates are 53.12% English, 34.38% Scottish, 6.25% SW Polish & 6.25% Austro-Italian, so at least the locations are reflected in all the results!
Hand-coloured or tinted photos have always been around since there have been photographs to colour. Sometimes it’s just a hint of a tint and in the more blatant efforts it looks more like the result of Homer Simpson’s makeup gun set to ‘whore’.
It’s hard to forget that the ‘olden days’ were full of colour and many a curious person looking at black and white photos has wondered “What did it really look like!?”
Over the years I’ve become self-taught in a number of computer programs but the one I have the most fun with is Adobe Photoshop. Combined with my interest in genealogy it wasn’t long before I starting figuring out ways to use old and historical photos. I started hand colouring (I figure I can still use the term since my hand is on the mouse!) some old photos in the family albums and was quickly hooked. Sometimes the end result could blow your mind as you flick back and forth from the original image.
Lately I’ve been colouring historical photos that have been popular on the Facebook group Lost Perth, widely successful in Western Australia where people having been digging up old photos of Perth’s yesteryears and posting them online for everyone to reminisce over.
My favourites are pre-1900 images. The further back the date of the photo, the harder it can be to imagine it in realities hue.
The first hand coloured photo that I posted was an image of the Old Men’s Depot that used to sit on Mounts Bay Road, right on the river. It’s such a beautiful image with all the elderly men relaxing by the foreshore and black swans swimming about. It’s not the clearest image and quite grainy, not ideal for colouring but it was a favourite that I really wanted to bring to life.
It was a bit hard to make it resemble reality due to the graininess but I think it turned out alright.
The next photo I chose is one of the oldest landscape photos of Perth and shows the Pensioner Guard Barracks just after they were built in 1865.
This was a popular choice as the Barracks were demolished in the 60’s with only the arch remaining so while the arch is a Perth icon, not many really knew about the Barracks as a whole.
In fact I coloured this photo twice. The first time I only had a cropped version and it wasn’t until I applied to the State Library of Western Australia for a hi-res copy of the original, that I saw all the wonderful things happening on the sides. On the left is a woman holding a baby. Another woman rests on a grassy mound. On the right are two boys tending their sheep, while a girl stands at the gate to her house. Three other children are also playing nearby.
Some commented that they’d love to buy a print so I applied at SLWA for reproduction rights and can now sell these as photo prints or on a canvasin a variety of sizes.
Yesterday I decided to check out the latest newspapers that have been added to the Trove website – one of my favourite site’s for researching Australian Family History, to find a massive 54 newspapers have been added, mostly for New South Wales and Victoria but the sole newspaper added for Western Australia is one that I’ve always hoped to search through.
The Herald, which is a still a current day newspaper for Fremantle, is now available on Trove, thanks to the City of Fremantle Library, with editions from 1867-1886 currently available.
After a quick search I found a great article about a Great-Grand Uncle, Luke Tonkin, who allegedly had been involved in an assault on another man.
I was hoping to find something on my GGGreat Grandfather, John Foss Tonkin, but couldn’t find anything substantial, I’m hoping later editions will turn up something for him.
But for now I get to know Uncle Luke a little bit better…
George Lockett, my Mum’s father, my Pop, was born in 1919 in Edmonton, England being the result of a short lived WWI tryst between English war nurse Eva-Rose, and an Australian soldier, John (Jack) Scott. That story in itself is an interesting read!
Eva-Rose’s father forced her to put George up for adoption and a then childless couple adopted him before eventually moving to Australia under the Government Group Settlement Scheme.
It’s one thing to wonder where you got your nose or eyes from and it’s pretty amazing seeing them in 100 year old photos of ancestors, but have you ever wondered where all these body parts originated?
Is my dark hair from the Italian side or is it Black Scotch?
I’ve always wondered where my dark hair and light olive skin came from. At first I thought it was the Italian in me, but my mother has the same colouring’s and from what we knew there was no Mediterranean blood on her side.
With the recent discoveries I can confirm this and have come to the conclusion that it must be Black Scotch, but it made me wonder just how much of me is English, Scottish, Italian etc, so I applied a little bit of maths to figure this out in percentages.
Of course with DNA testing, you can only figure out the exact percentage of DNA inherited by testing each generation, but you can still make a good go of it.
You could also take the sex chromosome route which means males are 50% whatever their direct paternal line is and 50% whatever the direct maternal line is. For females, who only inherit their chromosomes from their mothers, you would be 100% whatever your direct maternal line is. So in that case I’m 100% Polish but my brother is 50% Polish and 50% English (Cornish). Continue reading →
The Genetic Arborist 