William Wayment is my great great grandfather. He was born in Whaddon, Cambridgeshire, England around 1820-22. I have a number of really old photographs of him and his descendant's. The earliest photograph of William appears to go back before 1855-1865. No date is available but they are on paper and the albumen process wasn't available until the mid-1850's. The were a number of more recent photographs that I have and I thought some of the other descendants would like to have access to printable copies. What do I mean by printable copies? For starters, they were scanned to be 4" x 5" at 300dpi. If you aren't running 1600x1280, you will see scrollbars on the full size images. When you browse to the full size image, you can use the "save image as" menu item to preserve your own copy. Clicking with the right mouse button is a shortcut to the "save image as" choice.
The first pair of images is William and Martha "when young". William looks younger than 35 years old, which would date the photograph to before 1857. I have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it has an amazing abilities to recover some of these ancient and damaged photographs. One of my ancient photographs of my father was damaged. I found I could maintain the weave in his dress coat across the damaged areas. The second photograph of Martha has a terrible line in it. Look at what can be done very quickly on the full sized image. You can see where I removed the line but with a little more work that will disappear. Given time I can even remove the damaged area of her dress working on one scratch at a time. At this point, I let Photoshop works its magic but I increased the threshold to 2 pixels. You have to be careful when you do this because sometimes the image appears to go out of focus. This time we were lucky.
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In the first photograph Martha appears to be 8-10 years old. Emily on the bottom is something else. She has reached the age where you can tell without other factors.
William and Martha Wayment |
Martha Brown and xxx |
Emily Wayment |
Joseph Wayment and Ann Reed |
The Wayment family was really good at passing around genealogy data sheets with the old photographs on them. They are not gray scale images and scanning them lets you see that they were half-toned. That is the technique where the spacing of dots lends the appearance of gray scale. The images on this page were taken from the original photographs and are scanned using 256 step gray scale at 300dpi, which is all most printers will print in a reasonable time.
When DSL lines became widely used, it became reasonable to store the very old photographs at full resolution. These photos are not very large. They may be 2+ inches by 4+ inches. If you print the full size images in a photo editor such as Adobe Photoshop they are not noticeably different than the original. They were scanned as tiffs and are available for use by others as jpeg's. You can edit a tiff multiple times with out degrading the image. I don't pass them out so I have control of the originals.
The smallest sized image on this page as a tiff was 1.2MB and a couple were between 3-4MB. Doubling anything increases the size 4x. Some, such as the one of Samuel Wayment and his youngest children, demonstrate blocking. What I mean by this is that the original photograph had more information than I could scan. Shades of black became fewer shades of black. I have film that will compensate for this but processing time is very slow. The film is large, i.e., it is available only in 4" x 5" or larger film. You can process one 4x5 with the same amount of effort as 2 rolls of 120 or 3 rolls of 35mm. The 120 has 12 to 16 images and the 35mm has 24 or 36. The 35mm does not produce the same quality enlargement as an image on 120 or 120 when compared to 4" x 5". As the quality goes up, the processing effort jumps a factor of 2 to 10 times. What makes it really tough is developing sheet film in total darkness. You only have to load the rolls of film into the developing tank in total darkness and you can finish developing it in the light. MUCH EASIER :).
Alma Ernest Wayment and Mary Jane Slater |
Benjamin Wayment and Ida Foy |
Castina Frances Ann Chapman |
Castina and Sisters |
This set of photographs always holds my interest. I can see my great grandparents aging but the children capture my attention. The next to youngest is my grandmother. She was basically old when I started having real memories. She was 19 years old when she got married and my father was 32 years old when I was born. The ones of Pearl when she was young always make me chuckle because of those large eyes. They maintained their size as they grew up. They are the bottom two in the photo on the right.
Pearl and Ethel |
Samuel, Alma ,William, and Castina |
The next two photographs were shot while Samuel was on his Mission to England. He left 24 February 1893 and returned on 1 April 1895. The long portrait I can only contact print. The negative is typical of that time and is a 5" x 7". I can print almost anything up to 4" x 5".
Missionaries in England |
Samuel Wayment |
I realize the people in the next set of photographs are all adults but I called them "Castina with the boys" and "Castina with the Girls".
William Benjamin Alma |
Julia and Castina |
The photograph on the left is huge. It is 8" x 10" and looks like the old style contact prints. It was also one of the most difficult to scan. The texture of the photographic paper produced moiré patterns in the roof which had to be removed using Adobe Photoshop. The photograph on the right is of Samuel and Castina's children as they have aged a bit.
We went on vacation when I was young and we visited Sam at his place in Grants Pass, Oregon. I mostly remember being chased by one of his milk goats. While we were there, his daughter, Eva milked the goats.
Pearl and Ethel on Porch, Alma Center, and Full-res Plain_city_house (Large file) |
Benjamin, Alma, William,
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Everyone with the Wayment genealogy data sheets have seen this house. This is a much more recent version that was passed on to me by Brian Waymont from Dartford. In the original photograph, there was a door where the middle window is. I think we connect at William Wayment's grandfather. If you do a web search on William Wayment, my pages and Les, his son's, web pages show up.
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The link is to images of the Basil and Joe Wayment brothers using their plow. The book "Warren History" only claims it is one of the first plows in Warren; however, my fathers note on the back of the photograph was about them selling their rights to International Tractor Co. This raises a question we will never answer because of time.
