Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Ancestry adds Francis Frith photographic collection

Ancestry has added some 220,000 photographic images from the Francis Firth Collection to its database. This archive includes photographs taken by the eponymous founder of the collection in the second half of the 19th century in his travels in Europe, north Africa, Britain and Ireland.

While photos of all these regions are found in Ancestry's record-set, the collection has been named 'UK, City, Town and Village Photos, 1857–2005'.

The Irish album is relatively small at about 350 photographs; a significant chunk captures scenes in Dublin and Killarney, but many parts of the island are included. With pictures of cottages, piers, post offices, bridges, hotels, landscape and much more, most taken in the 1890s, shortly before Frith's death, the collection shows us the physical environment our ancestors lived in. It also reveals the social and structural changes that have taken place in Ireland over the last 130 years.