Where are all the photos?

It is one of the more remarkable features of the technological phenomena that millions of digitized photos go online every day. How many of these photos are of your ancestors? When I show people the Memories section of the FamilySearch.org website, they are very often amazed at the number of photos that have been uploaded of their ancestors. It would be a mistake to conclude that only people who are registered with FamilySearch.org or have ancestors that are Mormons [members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)] have photos on the program; just because I am a member, does not mean that all my ancestors were members of the LDS Church.

Have you ever searched online for photos of your ancestors? Do you know where and how to look?

It is interesting to know that all the tagged and captioned photos on FamilySearch.org are searchable by Google. The best way to find these photos is to search by your ancestor's name in Google Images program. If you want to see more photos, search by surname and add the term "genealogy" or put in the places where they lived. For example, here is a search for my Great-grandfather Henry Overson with the term genealogy added:

Every one of these photos relates to Henry Overson or his family in some way. Now, I must admit, that I put most of these photos online, but the interesting thing is that some of them are not familiar and came from sources completely unknown to me. If you click on one of the photos, you can see which website it came from. Here is a screenshot showing what happened when I clicked on one of the photos:

Granted, this is my daughter's website, but I was not familiar with the photo. This is an interesting and fairly simple way to make some extraordinary photographic discoveries.