The following teaser is excerpted from an article just posted on the Rhode Island College website.
Maureen Taylor ’78, sees the world through a wide-angle lens.
While in school, the Rhode Island College graduate found herself drawn to history, photography and genealogy. But while the majority of her peers earned degrees and went on to work in their own specified, niche fields, Taylor was fusing her experiences and interests into something more.
Maureen Taylor now operates at the center of the unlikely venn diagram her primary interests create. She is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of those three passions: history, photography and genealogy. That is, Taylor uses her deep knowledge of American history to analyze family photographs, gleaning clues from them to help clients learn more about their ancestors.
Nowadays, she goes by the title, “The Photo Detective.”
…Having authored and published three books – “Fashionable Folks: Hairstyles 1840-1900,” “The Last Muster: Images of the Revolutionary War Generation” and “Preserving Your Family Photographs” – and regularly hosting a variety of seminars on her expertise, it was inevitable that Taylor’s devotion to her work would lead herto her own family tree.
“I’ve learned a few fun things about my family,” she said. “On my mother’s side, my ancestors were amongst the first settlers in Quebec. On my father’s side of the family, there are a lot of dead ends, but it appears they were from Ireland.”
