The Gloucester Genealogical Society of Virginia and the Guinea Heritage Association hosted a joint meeting on Monday at Buck’s Store and Museum in Bena.

This meeting featured Newport News-based genealogist and local historian Merle Kimball, who served as the president of Hugh S. Watson Jr. Genealogical Society of Tidewater Virginia from 2015 through 2021. Kimball is also its Librarian and Quarterly Editor.

At this meeting, she gave a talk on “Identifying Old Photographs,” sharing her many tips on how to identify old photos. These tips could help those identify photographs that date as far back as the early 1800s.

Advice she gave was to learn about the family’s history, obtain census data on family members, and compare photos that have already been identified with ones that have not yet been identified.

She also gave more tips such as looking at the location and the time period in which the photograph may have been taken. Ways to identify the location and the time period of...