Top 10 tips for studying the family photo album

1. Dating old albums

Some of us possess 19th or early-20th century family albums containing photographs inserted neatly into pre-cut apertures and these weighty bible-like books are dateable artefacts in their own right. Purpose-designed photo albums first became available in Britain in the early-1860s, when fashionable card-mounted carte de visite photographs (cdvs) measuring around 4 x 2½ ins encouraged the collection and display of portrait prints. Early albums dating to the 1860s and 1870s contain only small cdv-sized apertures and photographs, but from the 1880s larger cabinet portraits (around 6 ½ x 4 ¼ ins) were popular, so albums of the 1880s to early-1900s typically contain both cdv and cabinet-sized apertures and photographs.

Victorian and Edwardian photographic formats and traditional leather-bound albums died out by WW1,