Dating old family photographs by clothing styles

Start with the mount, not the face

When you inherit a box of unnamed portraits, the temptation is to stare at the faces and hope for a flicker of recognition. Resist it for a moment. The frame, the mount and the printing method will often hand you a date range before you have identified a single person, and that range is usually tighter than anything you could guess from a nose or a chin.

Photography arrived in Britain in 1839 and changed its appearance roughly every decade thereafter. That is good news for family historians. A careful look at a portrait can usually place it within ten to fifteen years, and often closer. Once you have a date, you can start asking which of your relatives were the right age at the right time — and the unidentified faces begin to sort themselves.

Photographic formats and their useful date ranges

The physical object in your hand is the firmest evidence you have. Formats follow fashion, and fashion dates itself.

• Daguerreotype — cased, mirror-like, one-off images on silvered copper, roughly 1840 to the early 1860s. If you tilt it and it reflects like a dark mirror, think 1840s or 1850s.
• Ambrotype (collodion positive) — also cased, but the image sits on glass and often looks slightly negative in certain lights. Popular in the 1850s and 1860s.
• Carte de visite — a small card about 2½ by 4 inches, introduced to Britain in 1859 and at its height in the 1860s and 1870s. Immensely collectable; families swapped them like calling cards. Declining by the 1880s.
• Cabinet card — a larger mount, roughly 4¼ by 6½ inches, appearing in the mid-1860s and dominating the 1870s to the 1900s.
• Postcard-format photograph — a stiff card you could actually post, common from about 1902 onwards and very typical of the Edwardian years.
• Snapshots and small negatives — the arrival of cheap roll film at the end of the nineteenth century pushed photography out of the studio and into the garden.

Handle cased images with care: the covers, hinges and velvet linings all changed over time, and the gilding inside can be a further clue. Never clean the surface of a daguerreotype or ambrotype.

Women's dress: reading the silhouette

Silhouette is the fastest guide. Ask yourself where the volume sits — shoulders, waist, hips or skirt.

• 1830s: enormous puffed sleeves, sloping shoulders beneath, high waistlines only just disappearing.
• 1840s and 1850s: tight sleeves, sloping shoulders, full bell skirts, bonnets framing the face.
• 1860s: the crinoline — the widest, roundest skirts in British photographic history.
• 1870s: the first bustle, with drapery drawn back into an apron-fronted skirt.
• 1880s: narrow hips and a tall, shelf-like bustle; very high necklines, often with a cuirass bodice.
• 1890s: leg-of-mutton sleeves — big at the shoulder, tight at the wrist — with bell-shaped skirts and tailored shirtwaists.
• 1900s: the pigeon-breasted blouse, the S-bend corset, sailor collars, vast hats.
• 1910s: narrowing hems and simpler lines; by 1918, practical dress and shorter skirts.
• 1920s: dropped waists, raised hems and a straight, boyish line.

Men's dress: collars, hats and beards

Men's clothing changed more slowly, so use the details rather than the overall shape.

• 1840s to 1860s: frock coats, tall hats, high collars worn with wide cravats; side whiskers and moustaches.
• 1870s and 1880s: lounge suits appear, four-in-hand ties, stiff stand collars, bowlers and tall hats.
• 1890s: wing collars, knickerbockers for sport, blazers for leisure.
• 1900s to 1910s: sack suits, detachable stiff collars, boaters and flat caps, plus-fours by the 1920s.
• 1920s: softer attached collars, wider trousers, and a sharp fall in facial hair after the First World War.

Beards deserve a note of their own. Full beards were overwhelmingly popular in Britain from the 1850s to the 1890s. A clean-shaven man in a studio portrait from 1870 is unusual enough to make you check the date again.

Hair, jewellery and mourning dress

Women's hair offers quick signals. Centre partings, smoothed wings and hair drawn back belong chiefly to the 1840s to the 1870s. Fringes, or "bangs", become common from the 1880s. Bobbed hair places an image firmly in the 1920s or later.

Mourning clothes are among the most useful of all. After 1861, when Queen Victoria went into deep mourning for Prince Albert, black dress became almost universal for bereaved women. Look for dull, matte black fabrics, jet and black glass beads, and the widow's cap with its long streamers. Photography studios produced a great many mourning portraits, and families often wore black to sit for a photograph soon after a death. Deep mourning of this kind faded quickly after about 1914.

Children have their own rules. Boys and girls alike wore short frocks and tunics until about the age of five or six, so a child in skirts may be a boy. Older boys wore knickerbockers, sailor suits or, in the 1880s and 1890s, elaborate lace-collared outfits.

Turning clues into a working date range

Collect every clue before you decide. Combine the format, the mount design, the dress, the hair and any studio name stamped on the card. Then check the studio against a trade directory for the years it operated at that address — a very strong anchor, since mount addresses changed as studios moved.

A few cautions will save you from confident errors. Clothing could be old, borrowed or inherited, and a family might sit for a portrait in garments a decade out of date, particularly in rural areas or in straightened circumstances. Mounts could be reused or images reprinted later. Post-mortem portraits and wedding groups deserve separate thought.

Treat your date as a working range rather than a verdict, write it down with your reasoning, and revise it as new evidence arrives. Two hours spent dating the mount and the dress will often do more for your family history than two years of squinting at faces. And there is quiet pleasure in it: seeing your great-great-grandmother's sleeves tells you something about the world she moved through, not merely the year she sat down to be photographed.