About

The Photographer

Cornelius Philip Finn, my paternal grandfather (pictured right), was born in 1880. He held a bachelor's degree in chemistry and went on to work in the coal mining and coking industry. He was a keen amateur photographer and held a City and Guilds in photography. Sadly, as a young man he contracted tuberculosis, the loss of a lung putting an end to his dark room activities and thus, unfortunately, severely curtailing his photographic pursuits. Nevertheless, his tuberculosis treatment was ultimately successful and he went on to live to be 80 years old.    OBITUARY

The Slides

I had not yet been born when my grandfather died in 1961. However, my grandmother (Gladys Elizabeth Eddy, pictured left), who was more than twenty years his junior, survived him for nearly 30 years. As children, my siblings and I often visited Grandma Finn, as did many of my cousins. On one such visit in my early teens, I came across two warped and neglected boxes of magic lantern slides in an outbuilding (the "covered yard"). Many of the slides had been damaged by water and mould, but as I showed an interest, Grandma let me take them away.

I took them home and proceeded to attempt to repair them. This was accomplished in most cases by using electrical tape to replace the adhesive paper borders which, though intended to hold the plate and backing glass together, had in many cases simply fallen away. I soon lost interest (as restless teenage boys do) and the boxes sat in a corner of my bedroom, half "repaired" and forgotten.

Years later, when I had settled down and lived a long way from home, my father cleared out my bedroom (to use for visitors) and brought me the things which I had neglected to remove. Among these things were the two boxes of magic lantern slides. I kept these for several more years, still paying them very little regard.

Recently, I chanced to look at them again and discovered that some of the images were (at least to me) of interest, so I decided to create this website so that others may see them and also, as some are becoming very fragile, to preserve in some way these images of times gone by. Although my original repairs were crude, my father points out that if I had not rescued them when I did, they may have been lost forever. Instead, here they are.

The Author

The author of this website is a retired Oracle database developer and is a grandson of Cornelius and Gladys Finn.