Time-Travel With Vintage Landmark Photos

Take a virtual trip back in time to see world-famous landmarks, cities, and your own hometown the way your ancestors saw them.

I was looking at an 1850 photo of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Then I looked at a similar photo I took in 2015. European landmarks don't change that much. If they survived wars, they're still there, looking as grand as ever.

America is different. It's all about change. We demolish our sports arenas every 30 years or so and rebuild. My mom's childhood home is long gone, replaced by a school sports field. Even our family churches are gone or repurposed.

I started my time travel adventure with a landmark church a few miles from my home. The Library of Congress website has a 1907 photo of Trinity Church. To compare that photo to more modern times, I used Google Street View and captured the same angle. The house next door and 3 tall monuments are the same. But the fence is gone, the large bell is new, and the telephone pole wires are really ugly.

Some of the more startling photos you'll find in this virtual time machine show famous landmarks with almost nothing around them. That's how they looked to your ancestors.

Here are six other websites where you can look at old photos of landmarks that mean something to you.

Redbook's "Vintage Photos of Cities Around the World"

This collection of 30 old photos covers many destinations you may have visited. Number 20, Québec City, looks exactly as it did when I visited in 2017. The end of town in the photo has a landmark hotel that, thankfully, still looks the same.

Condé Nast Traveler's "Vintage Photos of the World's Most Famous Landmarks"

Seeing the Golden Gate Bridge under construction looks like a modern-day disaster film. The photo of people hanging out of the Statue of Liberty's crown makes me dizzy. This collection has a lot of Italian landmarks I've visited. It's fun to see them pictured decades ago.

MSN's "Then and now: vintage photos"

This slide show let's you compare then and now. The before-and-after of Dubai is particularly jaw-dropping. The Times Square photos show what my immigrant ancestors saw when they arrived. The high-angle photos of the Arc de Triomphe point out one key change Paris made to this landmark.

BoredPanda's "31 Before-And-After Pics"

Several cities in this group changed so much, they've rewritten the book on city planning. The 1945 photo of Berlin is frightening because you can see so much destruction. But the "now" photo is from the 1990s. Some of the comments on this page are funny, too.

OldNYC

This interactive website lets you set a time range and zoom into the map. Pick any location with a dot to view photos. I found photos of The Dakota, where John and Yoko lived, with no other buildings around it in 1920. I'm not sure Central Park West was even paved. And I found a beautiful photo of New York's Plaza Hotel in 1908. It's more impressive than I remember.

One more.

Far & Wide's "Then and Now Pictures of Cities"

This page features a jam-packed photo of New York City in 1904 that I can't even imagine. Street cars, horses and wagons, early automobiles, and pedestrians, all on a collision course. It looks terrifying.

I've been tracking down DNA matches (see "How to Solve a DNA Match Using Shared Matches") and finding living relatives (see "6 Steps to Finding Your Living Cousins") for weeks. This week I'll get back to adding missing source citations (see "3 Important Tips for Great Genealogy Source Citations"). This then-and-now journey is both a nice break and a cool way to understand how your ancestors lived and what they saw.