09 October 2014

FREE Book on Dating 19th Century Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, and Cased Tintypes


As family historians, we love photographs.  Sometimes though we struggle to figure out who is actually in the photograph.  To help us with that challenge, we often try to determine exactly when the photograph was produced.

If you are dealing with a 19th century photograph, that task might be a little easier now that Sean William Nolan has written Fixed in Time, a FREE book.  Here is his PR release ...

The book, "Fixed in Time", contains illustrations of hundreds of mat and case styles, identified by the specific years during which they were used. Many styles were used for only a brief time, allowing you to date some early photographs to within a year.

This has been a labor of love for the past two years, bringing together my interests in photography, history, and my skills as a programmer.  The book is the fruit of extensive research, having located over 2,100 objectively dated photographs from 1840 to 1865.  Other guides exist to help you date photographs, but they are not as accurate as mine, being based small data sets and conventional wisdom (which I have found is *usually* correct). My guide is, however, more focused, and does not discuss uncased images or photographs after 1870.

You can pick up a PDF of my guide by going to
www.facebook.com/fixed.in.time.book. You don't need to be a Facebook member to do this.

This book is a work in progress; I plan to issue an update next year. You can help me make the next edition more complete and precise by letting me know of any objectively dated cased photographs you may have.


I have downloaded the book and it is full of images to illustrate all that he talks about.  Makes me wish that I had some 19th century photographs (well, I actually wish that anyway ) so that I could explore their history in the context of the photography techniques of the time.

Did the book help you narrow the time frame of when a photo of interest to you was created?



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