Photographs

Although photographs will not generally provide any biographical information, they can be a useful adjunct to any family history or biography, as they may show what your ancestors looked like. The Battye Library holds about 1,000,000 images dating from c1850 and a proportion of these are indexed by personal name. A major part of the collection has been photocopied for ease of public use. Reference numbers can be obtained from the pictorial collection index (see Photographs of People). Increasingly photographs are being digitised and can be accessed through the online catalogue. Copies of photographs can be ordered, but copyright clearance must be obtained for any photograph still in copyright before it can be used for reproduction. In general photographs taken before 1 January 1955 are deemed to be out of copyright, but there still may be donor's conditions to be satisfied.