View month two of Stacey's search
This month my dad handed me an old family photograph that he said has something
to do with the Hornsby family. He was sent the images after learning of an article
printed several years ago in the Scunthorpe Telegraph’s Nostalgia
supplement about the Hornsby family. The mounted frame has two small prints
that have been hanging on a wall at my parent’s house for years. I never knew
who the people were in the images so largely ignored the photographs – that
is until now.
One image is in black and white and shows five elderly men all dressed very
smartly, standing in front of a doorway. The other picture shows a background
image of a cottage with a man holding a horse in the foreground. To his left
are two women sat down on chairs.
My dad believed the people in the first image were the five Hornsby brothers.
But he didn’t know the date of the image, why the brothers were all together
or where the image was taken. And he had no idea about who the person was in
the other image.
This made me wonder about photography in general in days gone by. Was it common
to have your picture taken back then or only something the rich could afford?
With all of this in mind I decided to visit North
Lincolnshire Museum on Scunthorpe’s Oswald Road to meet up with Dave Taylor,
the museum’s local history assistant and Mike Hemblade, assistant archaeologist.
Dave and Mike looked at my dad’s photographs and surprised me on how much information
they could tell me about them.
They said the picture of the five elderly men looked Edwardian and guessed
it had been taken between 1901 and 1910. They arrived at this conclusion through
looking at the clothing and also the style of the shot. The image looked like
it was taken to be a family memento. The men are all smartly dressed and aren’t
smiling – suggesting it’s a formal occasion. And because the photograph has
been taken outside of the house it suggests the photographer had visited them
especially for it.
Last month I learnt of a Hornsby family reunion in old Crosby in 1909. This
image would tie in with this. And it would explain why all of the five men were
dressed so smartly and looked quite elderly. Dave and Mike then showed me a
paper copy of an article printed in the Scunthorpe Target in September
1985 with the headline ‘Crosby famous Hornsby Clan’. The article described the
Hornsby family reunion in 1909 and at the bottom included the same photograph
of the five brothers that my dad had in his frame. It said the image was originally
printed in the Hull Times on 2 October 1909 and that it was the five
sons of John Hornsby. It said the photograph was taken at the Homestead in Crosby
where the brothers were all born. It then added the cottage they were stood
in front of was made of whitewashed iron stone.
Mike and Dave said they thought the second picture was older, perhaps late
1800s. They actually recognised the image because it was on the council’s Image
Archive system. The Image Archive is a service for anyone interested in
historic photographs of North Lincolnshire. Over 6,000 images from the middle
of the 19th century to the present day are available for you to look
at on the system. And it’s free to use. My photograph is recorded on the system
as circa 1890. And the image is described as James Hornsby’s cottage in old
Crosby. So James must have lived in the family cottage after his father, John,
had died.
The information Dave and Mike provided was really interesting. But they had
another trick up their sleeves. They then showed me maps from the early 1900s
so I could see what Old Crosby village was really like. They showed me a 1907
Ordinance Survey map of Old Crosby village. It showed Frodingham Road being
surrounded by fields. And Doncaster Road was nothing like it is today. It had
fields on both sides except for a gas works (the site now occupied by the Baths
Hall) and the Old Showground (where Sainsbury’s is).
The map clearly showed that the five Hornsby brothers grew up and then lived
for most of their lives in an isolated rural community, where local agriculture
was the main livelihood. Soon after this map was recorded Crosby saw large-scale
iron-ore, mining and smelting industry take over. The fields, farming and rural
way of life began to disappear.
Picture the times:
Dave Taylor from North Lincolnshire Museum said:
"There were lots of photographers operating locally during the early 1900s.
"We’ve actually created a large database here at the museum of all the photographers
we know of and we add new ones to it as we come across them. Some had their
own studios – but nothing like today’s standards though. They would have been
sheds or huts or even in an alleyway somewhere. In fact, some photographers
can be identified simply through the props they used. One photographer used
to put the same chair in his shots for nearly all of his work – so we can recognise
his work just through that!"
"The image of the five men would probably have been taken through a view camera
– more than likely the type with the mahogany box with a glass plate and the
hood over the back. And back then the most common format for photographs was
on postcards, which really took off in the 1890s. They could then be sent
through the post or sold as souvenirs. In fact postcards were the email equivalent
of their day. Back then there were four postal deliveries every day and it
only cost a penny to post something. So people could stay in touch quite well.
And during World War 1 this really helped soldiers send messages from the
front line."
To find out what happens next go to our family history case study – month four.