Can you determine whether the photos can even be removed from frame without damaging photo or frame? Would be great if there was ID info noted on back of actual photo wouldn’t it? I can’t help with any frame value into. Would be helpful if someone could ID frame as original to photo & age of both by the clothing and that might requiire a hands on inspection.. I understand your angst about what to do with old photos no one cares about & you can’t say who the people are. I’m always sad seeing so many old photos in vintage shops - I’d rather burn them than pass along to strangers - seems more respectful.

If you don't like the frames, remove the photo and donate the frames to a thrift store/Salvation Army/Goodwill. Or, if you're feeling really moved, see if there's an after-school art program or something like that who might appreciate the donation.

I love antiques, but sometimes, you have to just let go. The photos are the sentimental thing. Would you reuse the frame yourself? My feeling is that most people today have pictures on their phones or in some kind of digital storage, like a thumb drive or in a cloud, so they would not want any kind of frame. And it's a shame. Quality and beauty are a thing of the past, and this has bothered me for such a long time. Would somebody in the family treasure a bit of their heritage? Perhaps you might post the frames on a Free-Cycle or Buy Nothing site to find them a new appreciative home.

The photos are easily removed and sadly have no names on them. Imsuppose Ill add the photos to the box of ancestors and donate the frames. This whole process is difficult and I wish it had not all been left to me.

Thanks

Yes, donate - there are people who will buy them to spruce up.

Take a digital photo of the unknown ancestor and send it to every relative you know, even distant ones. Someone may be able to make an ID. So might someone at your local historical society.

After my dad passed away, my step mother demanded that I take his umpteen photo albums with pictures of their vacation trips, his club meetings, mission travels, time in the CCC, college, military, and from his childhood in the orphanage. Otherwise she was going to dumpster them. None of my 4 siblings, or their children, or my step sister, were interested. I found a home for the club photos at the local historical society; the orphanage photos at the Western Reserve library, threw out all but a couple of the vacation photos and most of the mission trip ones, and kept the personal ones/ones with other family. I was fortunate to find 2 photos (with their names) of his grandparents in the cache.

My mother successfully identified a bunch of ancestors by dating the clothing and then finding them in family portraits. As in a family with nine kids, with the gender and ages about right had to be my 3 greats grandmother's family. Then, the features of my great-grandmother or her siblings could be identified in the further photos.

I do have daguerrotypes of great-great aunts, for which I have no real use.

Raee, i have dumped so many photo albums of parties and vacations, etc etc. My mom had one friend in particular who made an album for every occasion. I wish it was all as easy to toss as that.

Good idea to compare these photos to others. Maybe Ill get to it one day. I have so many photos from one line of the family and very few from the others.

It is SO hard to throw out photos for me, but I've been doing it; every few years I throw out about 20-25%, and I almost never add to them (the only prints I make these days are enlarged ones for my walls). The number is dwindling, but it's still hard.

It's hard to tell the age and condition of the frame from the photo, but in general, they are worth saving, even if donated to a good cause. If you can keep any glass and backing with it, do so.

I have some exactly like these hanging in a hallway. The people in them are related to me someway but I don't know how. Since my old house is decorated in the mid-19th century style, these fit in. But I could see in most houses they wouldn't, but the frames would be of interest to antique dealers.

Well, i found a hint. The name of the photgraphy studio is on a photo. Find a Grave says the photographer was active in the 1900s and died at age 47 in 1906. So i am guessing the photos were taken in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Will have too dig in the family tree a bit. Like I have nothing else to do!

@dedtired That’s a pretty great clue! Does it say what city / cities the photog lived in or where studio was / is? Maybe you have familiy roots in those areas? Maybe the studio has a history too or even maybe still around? Long shot but …..

Yes, it gives the name of the town and my family lived nearby for generations. No one left there now, though though. Wish I had asked more questions when the older generation were still around. Now I am the older generation!

The frame and the daguerreotype are worth something as is. This is just a guess, but the era was around the Civil War when it was taken. The frame is walnut.

Have you researched your legacy? It might be a fun search.

I feel for you. I think I 've shared that I am really pretty good at decluttering and we did downsize a few years ago--------but the photos are my achilles heel. Every now and then I'll get motivated, but it's like it still seems like a huge huge bunch. ( in albums, loose, in bags, in boxes, slides, you name it).

There was one photo in a frame that had been in my mother's dresser bottom drawer forever of an interesting looking woman. Before my mother passed, I had brought it to her and asked who it was.. She said " I don't know but my parents always had it in their drawer". The woman didn't look like anyone I could think of , and I finally after moving her a few times, held the frame and told her I was sorry but I'd remember her face and wished I knew who she was. I gave it to a charity......

I still wonder about it but there was no writing, no photographer studio that I could read......

@salonva What a sweet / bittersweet story about the photo in your mother’s dresser drawer. The best thing about it is that it gave you a memory of your mother to share while remembering her.

Over the past two years I’ve pared down my personal photos too.I sent my siblings most of the photos of each of their families that I had - some they’d given to me & some taken during visits with them at their homes or mine. I knew I was giving them some duplicates but since they have multiple kids in each family I thought that might make it so each could have the same photos when they divy up. Turns out it sparked great family conversations for each of them as they looked over the packet of photos. For friends that we’re still in contact with, I sent photos taken with them to them. Lots of friend photos I tossed as ’who is this?’ category. Some years ago I had a DVD photo show made of my dad’s life - at my mom’s request - then I did the same for my mom’s life. I had a copy made for them & each sibling & we’ve watched the DVD’s at several family gatherings, my parents funerals included.

@dedtired - your task will take months to complete & is a challenge. Your Houzz name is appropriate. Be sure to remember to forgive yourself on the days you aren’t up to it & on days when you find the pile to keep is smaller than the toss pile.

There are larger than life photos of two of my great grandparents from about 110 years ago. Every one in the family has copies. The originals, in heavily carved wood frames, ended up hanging on the walls of a theme restaurant. Family members think this is a hoot and lots of folks now enjoy seeing Great Grandma and Pa.

My town has curbside recycling. I was told old photos are considered paper so every so often I slip in a few of those pesky un identified photos from 40-50 years ago.

I absolutely love that photo and frame combo. If no one cares about the photo or the frame, please try to sell them or donate them, as is. I would display that, even not knowing who the person is. It's fabulous.

The style of the hair and dress say Civil; war era.....but maybe she was late adapting? My great grandmother dressed like 1920 in 1950.

And the frame is definitly worth something....likely 3 pieces one walnut and one gesso carved and the inner one gold leaf.

I have 3 old photo albums and family bibles......thankfully my mother wrote what she kbnew on each picture when they came to her.....rather than keep in pristine condition!

The style of clothing is well before 1900. I'd put it around 1850-60. I would keep both picture and frame. Who knows who might wish to have that family information in the future?

When my In-laws died with in 30 days of each other the four sons divvied up the THOUSANDS of photos/slides/images they took and collected of their marriage of 60 years. The goal was to wade through, document ONE highlight from each trip/event/holiday. We scanned and compiled into one photo bucket file. My husband ended up with the ancestorial box. How ironic since he knew little of it and cared less. I spent a season doing my best to pick and choose. We too had a few pics no one knew who was who. Next step burning the pictures. Throwing them away, giving them to a thrift store as some do, seems very odd. My daughter is into old photographs so I have been siphoning some to her, encouraging her to use her own ancestors vs strangers on her walls. I came across the box of photos yesterday as I deep cleaned the office. We have our own archives of photos my offspring will one day divide and concur but something tells me they will have this lone box of ancestors to deal with too. That frame is worth nothing. That pictures 'value' is in the eye of the beholder. Scan it. Preserve it, but reduce it's presence and set it aflame.

dedtired, when I first started looking into my ancestors (that I knew very little about - didn't know that my mother had 18 aunts and uncles!!) with an ancestrydotcom subscription, I found it a rather relaxing change of speed from my job and home care. That's my personality (weeding the lawn is the same for me lol). Maybe it will someday be the same for you.

Rae, yes I have an Ancestry account and have learned a lot. One relative also has an account and he is very into geneology.. If I follow the family line we share , it goes back to 1511! I agree, its fun to digaround.

I am beginning to think the woman in the photo is my great great grandmother. The dates line up and with the hint of her clothing looking like the civil war era, it could be. Her namewas Maria Matilda ( lastname last name).

The dress and hair certainly look early 1860's or so. She looks young so it would be very odd for her to wear a dress that belonged to a mother or grandmother. And it looks like mourning. Can you see a wedding ring? What is she holding in her hand.

I have organized , curated and put into albums all of the collected photos and things from the family and I feel that I could talk extensively about it. but .........

If you put those unknown photos into an album they can be easily kept and easily viewed. Whereas the framed one takes up space and is awkward.

Surely there must be someone who would want those antique frames.

The old photos are still a curious item and it does look as if that one may be from around 1870, or so. Even if you dont know who it is , it is stil interesting. Just be sure that you label them somehow so that they dont get mistaken for family.

I have a few tintypes like that . One looks for all the world to be Billy the Kid, but probably not. And I have a set of photos from a wheat farm family in teh OKlahoma pandhandle from early 20th century. I scanned them and then found the family that they belonged to, found them and mailed them out . So, the point is that I have labeled them all as begin non family. These had belonged to one of my aunts many husbands .

You are dedicated, Claudia. She is definitely family. There are three other photos taken at the same time.

Although it looks like a tintype, it is actually printed on heavy paper. I put all four photos in a folder with the information I have. I just hope one of my nieces will take the family memorabilia.

Ive learned a lot from everyone’s input. Thanks Thanks.

I had to get rid of two rubbermaid tubs full of old family photographs. I ended up with one entire tub full of photos of people that nobody knows/knew. There's nothing on the back of the photos, and none of my distant (or what few near) relatives I have, knew who they were - nor did they want them.

I recycled them.

Came back to say: you don't have to keep stuff out of "guilt" or "obligation." Get rid of whatever you don't want or need. There's no shame in that.

Lola, you are so right. I have to ask myself whether its worth ten minutes of my time trying to decide about to what amounts to a few pieces of wood. I actually do better at tossing stuff when I am feeling grumpy and just say ” the heck with it” and out it goes.

Yes, you have to be in a certain mindset when going through that stuff. As I have said so many times, I'm pretty good and swift at it EXCEPT for photos.

Somehow I haven't found the right mindset that can stick around for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Lola, love your philosophy & rationale! For me, when I had to sort through tangible family items - not photos - & have no one to pass them down to I comforted myself thinking about the great purpose ahead for all the china, dishes & especially collectibles, etc - they would be filling needs and providing joy for new people.

Lola, i currently have four sets of fancy china. Thrree are going, for sure.

This is a timely thread for me. I have been going through old boxes that belonged to my grandparents, and there are tons and tons of old black and white photos from the start of photography into the mid-1960's. They haven't been properly stored but are still in good shape. I really hate throwing them away, but there isn't anyone in the family who wants them. I have no love lost for that side of the family so don't need to keep any of them.

Check this place out. Harry's Second Hand "Antique dealer." He has a ton of china and i think almost none of it gets sold. It's almost as if his "store" is an excuse to hoard stuff that he likes but no-one else wants. He is trying to sel the whole thing, store and inventory for $125k. You would have to take over the lease on the building, but the business and inventory would all be yours. I would rather send things to the dump than donate them, or even give them to a dealer. Can't stand the idea of strangers looking at it as if it was garbage.

HARRY'S SECOND HAND

Look at that leaded glass window in image 72!! I’m on it!

I went there recently and I could not see past all the ridiculous stacks of dishes he had. Mainly I look for furniture and he mostly had cheap stuff. But you're right! He has other things, you just need the patience to look past the clutter and keep going.

Michael - isn’t that the fun of going through these kinds of stores - looking past the clutter? 😀

Bluebell, we’re living parallel lives. Just when i thought Id reached the end of the photos, i found another box full. The nightmare that never ends.

Holy moley, Michael, thats quite the hoard.

For Lola and those who say discard if you don't know who they are ...NO NO NO!!! My grandmother had no interest at all in who she came from.....and tossed stuff she shouldn't have. I have no idea who her father was....other than a name and that he died young. Luckily another family did care and i was able to do some matching from pictures and letters they saved. Because you are not interested in your heritage, doesn't mean that down the line somneone wont' be. And those old pictures and letters are irreplaceble. If you don't want to save the totes get them digitized. By tossibng you are trashibng your history.

I have a lot of pictures, including some with people I can't put names to but that's OK I'll keep them. Only got 3 digitized so far. Mom with her elementary school class, another of mom when little, another of the store in the Rocky Mountain Town where my father was born but the people in that picture are not family. maybe even it could be a postcard, but the connection is that's where dad was born.

Michael - the picture of elementary school class — look at all those big shirt collars on those little kids! And the 2 girls in 2nd row from bottom - their dolls! Wonderful pictures.

I have two boxes of old photos and I've only been able to give names to a handful of people in them. Apparently at some point my Dad decided to remove old photos from their albums and combine them with a box of photos. Now I can't tell if the photos are from his Dad's side of the family or his mother's.

But it gets better. My Dad moved in with us after my Mom died and one day I came home and heard the paper shredder. He was in the study shredding photos and when I asked him why he just shrugged and said he didn't know who was in the photos so he didn't need them.

That's one way to handle the task.

Dad did you a big favor. I went in my mom’s big storage closet and found a box marked ”thrift shop receipts”, from a shop where she used to volunteer. Ah ha, now there’s something to recycle! i took the lid off and it was more photos. I could have cried. So another long round of toss, keep or send to someone else. It was easy to toss the pictures of my niece’s first wedding although there were some cute ones of my son and others, so those went in my pile to keep.

For Linda Campbell:

Those photos were FIRST sorted through by others (my paternal great-grandparents' siblings, my paternal grandparents' siblings, my dad's brothers and their kids) in my family - I'm the last to get them. They were offered to every single person on this planet that I'm related to. NOBODY wanted them, and NOBODY wants them now. NOBODY knows who they are. There's NO WAY to find out, because anyone who could name them is long dead.

My children will not be having children of their own, so there's NOBODY to hand these off to.

I have no siblings. My mother was an only child. My maternal grandmother's siblings had no children. My maternal great-grandmother's siblings had no children. My maternal great-great-grandmother had only two siblings, both of whom died in childhood. My maternal 3great-grandmother was a "dock worker" if you get my drift... so there's zero record of who she was, or who actually was the father of my maternal 2g-grandmother.

For you to ASSUME I'm not interested in my heritage is hilarious. I am the family genealogist, along with one of my 1c2r. We've documented everything that's documentable. There's NO WAY to tie photographs to the letters we have, the church records we have, or the census records we have. They're just pictures of unidentifiable people standing (for example) on a porch of an unidentifiable house in an unidentifiable town in a year that's only sort of identifiable based on their clothing or horse wagons or Model T's in the yard.

So. Stop with your ASSUMPTIONS about me and my interests. Telling me I'm trashing my history is also silly. ASSUMING that I've not digitized old letters/records is also silly. All of my research is publicly available to anyone with an Ancestry or Family Search account - but there's NOBODY in my family who even cares because my direct ancestors had few siblings and even fewer children.

My father's paternal family, way back in 1905, assembled a genealogy of their ancestors (limited to parents of parents, and only included the siblings back 2 generations), printed into a book, along with a photo collage of the current clan. Over the years, only one person kept the original book; she made copies of it and distributed them to everyone in the family who would take one (she recently passed at the age of 99). It seems the photo had more than one copy still in families, but there was no key to it and for most the identifications were lost.

Right now, 118 years later, there are 6 primary descendents (including myself) who are interested and working on fleshing out the genealogy. Primarily through the work of one who had contact with many people in the community and who kept a copy of the photo in his office, all of the people except for 2 in the photo collage have been identified.

I've been working on a group photo of my paternal grandmother's "cousins club" from their 1940 picnic. So far I've been able to identify 127 people out of 163. I've discovered that the 2 that I initially thought might be my grandmother and uncle were in fact her first cousin and her son!

That a great Victorian frame. I see them at the antiques show with a mirror in the center.

I enjoy a minimalist lifestyle and am uncomfortable around clutter and excess stuff. I cull through ALL of my possessions on a regular basis. My motto is, "When in doubt, throw it out." I love the feeling of lightening my load. In all of my years of discarding things, there is almost nothing that I regret getting rid of. And those few things...eh, I'm doing fine without them. Scan the pictures you want to keep. And if it seems too time-consuming to do that, it's a pretty good indication of how you really feel about them. Your time and space are limited resources. Why waste them?

To your question, those frames are collectible. They are quintessential walnut frames from the late 1800s Victorian period, that size goes for $50-$75 at an antique store. You can easily remove the pictures. I once bought the same size frame with the picture of an unknown woman (I wanted just the frame and had planned on tossing the picture). When I later removed the picture I found a handwritten family tree for the woman on the back of the picture going back 200+ years. Was able to match it up to some family trees on the internet and ended up sending the picture to a modern day descendant.