Hi everyone,
After admiring the excellent work of the RootsChat photo restorers, I am appealing for help with my own family photos.
My great-aunt passed a little more than a year ago and amongst her possessions I found this beautiful gold heart-shaped locket. I'm not very good at recognising antiques so I initially thought she had bought it fairly recently. However, I looked inside and I found photographs of my great-great-grandparents, Laurie & Eleanor Hobbs!
This was very exciting as prior to this I only had photos of them post-1901. Unfortunately, the photos are very small so the quality isn't great and Laurie's photograph is missing the bottom part but beggars can't be choosers!
I have attached two versions; an edited version for the daters and the originals for the restorers (I read on another post that restorers prefer originals). I did the restore myself but my photo editing skills are rudimentary at best and I have no idea how to improve quality or go about fixing that missing part under Laurie.
For the daters:
Laurie (1856-1936) m. Eleanor (1857-1956) in 1881.
They were both born, raised and died in London.
I don't know whether the photos were taken at the same time but they are not printed on the same paper and Eleanor's photo is larger than Laurie's. It is hard to tell but I'm pretty sure she is wearing a locket in the photo. However, it is not the same as my locket as the chain is too short. I have a photo of Eleanor's daughter, my great-grandmother Julia wearing my locket in 1910 so she must have passed it down. There is more than one locket but I don't know what happened to the other one. I looked up my locket and I found similar ones from the 1890s but Laurie and Eleanor look far too young so I believe she might have transferred them over. There were actually two photos of Eleanor inside; one young and one taken in the early 1900s of her in her 40s. There is nothing on the back which would help dating and I can't take them out of the locket again to scan as the last time I did a big chunk came off Eleanor's photo... oops.
Side note: does anyone know how these locket photos were done? Did people use photos they already had and have a smaller version made or did they have new photos taken specifically for the locket?
Thank you so much for any help you can give me. I really appreciate it!
Kind regards,
Queenie