Picture Analysis
Can you tell me anything about this photograph showing my nan as a girl?
Q I’m interested in finding out more about this family wedding photograph. I’m confident the two little girls at the front and the baby are my nan, Constance Victoria Ruby White, and her two sisters. Nan was born in 1904 in East Ham and her younger sister Maude in 1908. The lady holding baby Maude is probably my great grandmother, also Maude.
A Group photographs from family weddings are wonderful historical records, portraying many ancestors together in one place. This professionally mounted photograph was taken by a local photographer who visited this outdoor location – probably the garden of the bride’s family home. You name him as LE Wilson, although this doesn’t show on your scan, and a brief entry for Louis Edward Wilson on a website covering early London photographers confirms a Battersea address in 1901: photolondon.org.uk/#/details?id=8558.
Guests wore their best formal outfits to weddings, and female costumes in particular can provide a firm timeframe for unidentified marriage photos. Older ladies typically looked sedate and conservative, younger women more fashionably dressed. Here the most modern bodice, sleeve, hat and hair styles indicate a date of c1909–1911. The bride and groom are seated centrally, the groom apparently wearing police uniform, the bride a traditional white gown and veil. Small flower girls appear to be aged about three or four and five or six, so the oldest could well be your nan Constance (born 1904), and the baby possibly Maude (born 1908). Hopefully you can now pinpoint the wedding, which most likely occurred in 1909.
1 FASHIONABLE INDIVIDUALS
In a mixed group wedding photo, the most fashionably dressed ancestors are the young adult females, seen here standing mainly in the back row and far right in the second-back row.
2 HEADWEAR
Elaborate hats were usual at weddings and c1909–1912 the most fashionable headwear, worn by young women, featured enormous brims and crowns, and was ornamented with large bows and birds’ wings.
3 MEN’S SUITS
Most men wear threepiece lounge suits, their short-moderate jacket lapels suggesting a year close to 1910.
4 MATURE LADIES
The older seated ladies in the photograph, possibly representing the couple’s mothers and grandmothers, wear sombre dark clothes and modest shoulder capes, as well as outdated upturned hats and matronly bonnets.
5 COLLARS
The high-necked, frilled, white blouse collars seen on at least six women here were a classic late-Edwardian fashion, often layered beneath a coloured square-or roundnecked bodice.
6 SLEEVES
By 1909 high-fa shion sleeves were usually narrow. The outgoing style was the full puffed sleeve, as worn by your great grandmother Maude.