Reuniting photographs in the digital age....


Family history reunites extended family to share their stories and, if we're lucky, old photographs. Sharing is so much easier with digital images. Multiple copies can be distributed electronically anywhere in the world without the cost of duplicating or the need for the custodian to part with their treasures. 

The top digital image was shared with me by my Killion third cousin who'd received it from his Killion second cousin once removed, my third cousin once removed. It's among a group of unidentified photos thought to be Killion family in the possession of cousin Helen. When I shared digital images of photos in my possession, the connection was made with the second image which is a "carte de visite" of my great-grandfather, Francis (Frank) Gersbach.

So we started looking more closely. Frank married Margaret Killion on 26 May 1885 at the Catholic Church in Kempsey. Frank was twenty four and Margaret was twenty three when they married. We thought that their pose was typical for a wedding portrait of the time.  

Researching the photographer, we established that the studio was only located in Sydney and never operated or visited Kempsey.

We asked Helen if there was an inscription on the back of the photo. In the faintest of writing, she could read-

Aunty Maggie and Uncle Frank

Our thought is that, not long after their marriage, Frank and Margaret travelled to Sydney to visit their uncles and families and had the portraits taken to commemorate their marriage.

So it seems that, over the last one hundred and thirty seven years, the portrait of "Auntie Maggie and Uncle Frank" has travelled from Sydney to Kempsey back to Sydney with Helen's great-great-grandparents and then to country Victoria.

Writing this is all the more special as I'm looking across the Hastings River to where Margaret was born on the family farm on 10 February 1862. Her parents, John Killion and Jane Feeney, married at the residence of William and Elizabeth Killion which is 150 metres from my accommodation and is now the Port Macquarie Museum. I treasure all these memories of my family.


Written to meet "the current challenge" for our Society of Australian Genealogists' "bloggers group".

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