2012 - Volume #BFS, Issue #12, Page #33
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Find Your Family Farm In Old Aerial Photo Archive
You’ll never know what you’ll find in an old aerial photo. Recently, one happy customer called to order three more prints of the same image for presents. Why? Upon receiving his framed photograph, he saw for the first time the image of a girl on a bicycle. It turns out that the girl was his 8-year-old sister, who died the same year the picture was taken. This was probably the last known picture of her. Our customer ordered the additional three prints to give as a gift to each of his three brothers. Needless to say, it was a special Christmas for the entire family. With more than 25 million black and white negatives in the company’s archives, the odds are good that Vintage Aerial can find an old aerial photo of your farm, or maybe a farm you grew up on, or a place that is special to you. For four years, Vintage Aerial has been scanning negatives from the 1960s to 1990s, creating digital images that are viewable on the Internet. More than 4 million photos are already scanned, but all the photos in the archive can be searched by date and location, and once they are found, they can be promptly scanned and made available for viewing. The collection dates back 50 years and covers 41 states.
“We estimate that every photo of a farmstead is connected to about 30 people, spread over several generations,” Fritz Byers, Vintage’s president says. “We are trying to reach the second, third and fourth generations.” With many of the farms gone, descendants are often interested in preserving that part of their family history.
Vintage Aerial compiled its vast archive from multiple libraries created over fifty years by family businesses that took photos from two-seater prop planes and then sent salesmen door to door to sell the prints. This was a hit-or-miss business, and the company estimates that about 80 percent of the photos were never purchased.
To get started, go to the company’s website, and type in your county and state to find out how many photos the company has from your county, in what years they were taken. Then, fill out a form with the current address you’re interested in, and Vintage’s researchers will layer current maps over old maps to find the farm and the photos that show it.
A Vintage librarian will then call you and go through a slideshow of photos over the internet to find the right one. “Often several photos were taken through the years of the same location, and customers like to purchase all of them for a collection to hang on the wall.” Byers says. “The collection tells its own story of change and, taken together, the photographs create a rich set of memories.
“People get excited when they can see the farm at a time when it was still active,” he explains. “About 40 percent of the farms shown in our archives no longer exist. When our customers find a picture of a missing farm, especially one they grew up on, the result is powerful way to recapture their special past.”
Vintage Aerial sells the photos with various sizes, options and frames, starting at $199 up to $499 for a framed 20 by 30-in. print.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Vintage Aerial, 4185 Chappel Drive, Perrysburg, Ohio 43551 (ph 888-402-6901; service@vintageaerial.com; www.vintageaerial.com/farmshow).
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