When a person dies, the only things you have left to remember them by are their personal possessions, your own recollections, and any images which were taken of them during their lifetime.

All too often, photographs are unmarked, undated, unnamed, and un-remembered. Soon, you’ll find yourself looking through boxes, books and albums full of old snapshots, with the faces of the nameless and forgotten dead, staring ominously at you for all of eternity.

This set of circumstances might not bother some people, but for others, it can be downright depressing, and frustrating, to not know who someone in a photograph is, especially if the picture is rare, or has some sort of family significance.

I recently had such a case, which I’ve decided to write about. It concerns the following photograph:

Click on the photograph for a higher-resolution image!

The hard copy of this photograph is in the custody of my Uncle John – one of the several thousand Uncle Johns in the world – all of whom, I’m sure, are equally as interesting, fun and fascinating as my own. But this is my Uncle John, and in my own roundabout way, I want to thank him for preserving this snapshot so wonderfully, and for rescuing it and keeping it safe for the family.

This photograph sat in my Uncle John’s home for years. I don’t know how long he’s had it, and I never recall seeing it in the many times I’ve visited his home for Christmas, and other events, but apparently that’s where it’s been for many, many years. Indeed, it was only because of a family reunion several months ago that I learned of the photograph’s existence!

So, what is the significance of it? 

Well, to put it simply, it is a photographic record of my grandmother’s family, and its very existence means a lot to me, purely because we don’t have very many photographs of my grandparents or their extended family which have survived. Because of that, getting to see this photo has helped me learn more about my own family history, and has helped to clear up more than a couple of things which I could never understand about my family tree!

Such is the power of old family snapshots. They bring back memories, and they are an indelible record of what has, or hasn’t happened during the lifetimes of relations who have since passed on.

So, who are the people in the photograph?

The photograph depicts my grandmother, her sisters, her brother, their mother – my great-grandmother – as well as spouses and in-laws. Grandma, her sisters and brother are No. 2, 4, 6 (grandma!), and 7 in the photograph, from left to right, with great-grandma seated out the front. The others are my great-uncle’s two wives (yes, such things happened in Malaya back then), and another sister-in-law (far left). There is yet another sister in the family, which isn’t included in the photograph.

Apart from my grandmother, and my Great-Aunt Annie (3rd in the photograph), I’ve never met anybody in this photograph. Most either lived too far away, or were already dead (such as Great Uncle Jackie in the middle, and Great Grandma out the front, who died in the 1950s, and in 1976, respectively).

How Old is the Photograph? 

As best as we can determine, the photograph dates to ca. 1954/5, at which time, my grandmother (born 1914), would be around 40 years old. She was the oldest of four sisters and one brother, and Uncle Jackie was the youngest.

What are they Wearing?

The clothing represented in the photograph is a mix of styles. My great-aunt on the far right, my grandmother’s sister-in-law, on the far left, and my great-grandmother (front and center) are wearing a traditional Straits-Chinese/Peranakan outfit called Sarong Kebaya. Sarong is the wraparound skirt, Kebaya is the close-fitting, light-material blouse buttoned over the top. This is capped off with traditional, hand-beaded Peranakan slippers.

My grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s family were ‘peranakan’, also called ‘Straits Chinese’, Ethnic Chinese who lived in Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia. Today, the Peranakan are a small subset of the Chinese diaspora, and are only found in Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, and after World War Two, further afield in other countries.

By contrast with my great-grandmother and her daughter, my Great-Uncle Jackie, and one of his wives are wearing more Western-style clothing – A suit and bowtie, and a blouse and skirt.

Great-Aunt Annie (third-left) and grandma (second-right) are wearing a type of dress called a Cheongsam, a rather formal-type Chinese dress, popularised in Shanghai, in the Roaring Twenties! You’ll notice that both dresses are made of the same material. Grandmother was a dressmaker, and most likely, made both dresses for them!

If you look REALLY closely, you’ll notice that my great-aunt on the far-right, and my great-grandmother, are not only dressed in traditional ‘Nyonya’ outfits, but are also wearing traditional Peranakan jewelry! My great-aunt is wearing a Nyonya silver belt (to hold her sarong up), and my great-grandmother is wearing what’s called a ‘kerongsang’, a set of (usually three) brooches, used to hold the kebaya together.

This is my grandmother’s nickel-silver Peranakan belt, of the same style, one of two such belts which have survived in our family, and which I treasure above almost anything else! These belts are extremely rare today. They were all hand-made, and each one was a one-off artisan piece, produced by a Peranakan silversmith or jeweler. Many of them are family heirlooms.

Concluding Remarks

Learning about the family history behind this photograph meant a lot of picking the brains of my collective aunts and uncles, and it wasn’t easy, since no one person knew the entire background of everybody in the photograph! Finding out who everyone was, who their children were, who they were married to, birth-dates, death-dates, descendants and so-on, involved interrogating every relation I could find! (Thanks to Uncle John, Uncle Henry, Aunty Lily, and dad for filling in SO MANY BLANK SPACES!!!)

Regrettably, the collective knowledge of the family didn’t go back very far, only one or two generations at most. Nevertheless, I intend to record it all!! Once we lose this information, we’ll never get it back, and I don’t intend to lose any of it, if I can help it! There’s no Graveyard Google or anything to consult, so I hope to get everything written up properly soon. Eventually, I intend to create little information-cards to stick into the back of the fresh, printed copies of the photograph, and keep them there as a record of family history, such as it is.