Dating family pictures by knowing more about automobiles

My fourth cousin Pam Fullerton.   How can knowing the make, model, and model year
help us to ID this picture and approximate the date?  

I have two passions in life.  Genealogy and automobiles.  Of the two, genealogy is a relatively new avocation - I have only been at it for forty so odd years.  American cars, however have fascinating me for as long as I can remember, from babyhood on up.  That is fifty-five years.

As a child I owned matchbox (small), Corgi (medium) and dealer promo cars (large) - all scale replica's of the real cars that real people drove.  I played with them constantly, but never combining any with differing scale sizes, because I was an am OCD.  OCD? Look it up and my picture will be right there.

Because I am so car obsessed, and as a genealogist, historian and published author of local and regional histories, I get asked - a lot - about identifying and dating cars in the pictures.  Over my lifetime I have amassed a strangely large library of books, catalogs and guides on American cars, and I have been pouring over these books for as long as I can remember.

You might say that I have the ready reference library, already.  So why not put it to good use.

So one of the ongoing features of this blog about helping you to become better at identifying cars in your family pictures and understanding how the car in the picture can tell you more about the people, the times that they lived in, and why there are so many pictures of people standing with their automobiles in the image.  If you think about, aside from Christmas Trees, cars probably the number one large proper that people use in snap shots.

(That bale of hay and wagon wheel in the Olan Mills portrait is the number one prop for awkward family photos.)

While we can date pictures by looking at clothing, looking at hair styles, looking at the type of picture, the paper and backing comprising the picture and background cues, the first thing that you remember should about a car being added to a picture is that usually symbolizes something what the people in the image are doing, or plan to do.

Aside from racing images, an automobile in a picture can mean that they have a new car that they want to show off, or that a family member has a new car.  It can mean that they are at an outdoor event and need a backdrop for a picture or a prop.

Automobiles are at once necessary things that we buy, or they can be proof of life priorities and discretionary income.  They can show us the aspirations of a person, or a reminder of position that a person held before an life event, like the Great Depression took away from them.

In one case, I have seen a pictures of a new car that a solider bought in 1941, posed in front of when he joined the army, and pictures of that same car, on blocks in his parents barn, where the car has sat since word was received that the man was killed in action.

Cars are either pollution belching beasts, or they are beloved touchstones to our pasts.  They can be a treat, or in a worst case scenario, in an accident, they can take away the life of a loved one.

For most of us, a car represents an enormous amount of money spent - either for transportation, or for nostalgia.  For me, whenever I see a 1965 Chevrolet Impala convertible, I get a lump in my throat, and I ache for the years in my childhood when my mother proudly owned and drove one.

If you doubt the value of understanding cars in a family's life and its history, watch this video.  Get the Kleenex ready.

So I hope that you will join me and I hope you'll learn something new about cars, what they look like, what they could be, what they are, what they mean, and how they can connect yourself deeper to your family history by knowing more about the American automobile.