RootsChat.Com

Can anyone tell me when sepia prints on card became commonly available in the UK? I am trying to date a number of old family photos and it occurs to me that presumably there must be an "earliest date" before which having a studio photo such as the attached was not affordable by most people. I know that the wet collodion process made photography more mainstream from about 1850, but I thinking more about when having one's portrait taken in a studio became affordable by ordinary people. 1860s? 1870s?

More specifically, does anyone have suggestions on the dates of the attached, perhaps based on the clothes? I believe they are one of two ancestors and their wives, both living in Scotland, one a farm labourer in Forfarshire and the other a commercial clerk in Edinburgh.

My 4g-grandfather John Millar (1783-1830) and 4gg/m Betty Millar and their eldest son Charles Millar (1807-1870) farmed at Inverquharity, near Kirriemuir, on the Kinnordy estate.

After 1830 several of Charles's siblings also worked elsewhere in Forfarshire (George 1808-, John 1810-84, James 1812-, David 1814-, William 1816-, Betty 1819-90) and his youngest brother Peter 1825-92, emigrated to NZ where he created a farm that he named Inverquharity.

Next month I plan to make a trip to the area (I live in Canada) to look for more details of the siblings and their descendants, and ideally to find John and Betty Millar's parents (unfortunately I've not been able to find any of their complete BMD records that normally give that information, only a one-line entry for John's death).

If anyone believes they might be descended from the same family and would like to share info I'd love to hear from them. I have fairly complete trees for the descendants of Charles, John, Betty and Peter.

I'm hoping someone might know a bit about the history of Greenbank Cemetery in Bristol, one of the larger cemeteries in the city which started around 1870.

I have a ggrandfather there so I contacted the cemetery managers, got the exact plot number, and later managed to get a detailed map of where the plot is. I went along and the section of the cemetery where he is supposedly buried, and which on their map is full of used plots, is largely just a grassy area with kids playing! There are a few old gravestones, but not many. I am 99% sure I have read the maps right, and even if I haven't, large areas of Greenbank are the same, just grass.

So I'm confused -- have they cleared the graves at some point, or was it common practice (as the cemetery manager has suggested to me in an email) to bury people without any headstone in that cemetery? I notice that a great many of the headstones have been carefully laid down (presumably they were about to fall down and they were preventing them just falling and breaking).

If anyone does know the place well, the grave I am looking for is George James Marjoram (1808-1878) who supposedly resides at "plot 60 Yellow T".  The cemetery is divided into alphabetic areas (see attached map) and T is pretty clear, and from the finer scale map I have plot 60 is in area T2. No idea what "yellow" means!

I've been researching my family history for a couple of years and now have a solid understanding of who's in my tree and their birth, marriage and death dates, where they lived, and their occupations, built up from a mix of Ancestry.com records, a good collection of handed-down photos, quite a few birth/death/marriage certificates, and a limited amount of rooting around graveyards and church records.

What I feel I am missing is much knowledge of their lives beyond that, such as any specific episodes or things they did.

Therefore I am thinking of subscribing to one of those online newspaper archives and trawling through those to see if any of them get a mention, but I'm skeptical that most people ever do anything to get a mention in a newspaper. I'd be interested to hear if people have found looking through newspaper archives for such individual stories of much help. Or are they more useful for just getting a general feel for what life was like in a specific town/county at a specific date?

Suggestions on good strategies would be much appreciated. I just suspect that it's the sort of thing that could consume a lot of time for little reward unless you have a disciplined way of going about it and know what to look for!

Thanks!