Recently, while searching on TheGenealogist’s Image Archive, I was struck by a photograph of a woman with her child that had appeared on the gallery home page. Momentarily distracted from the reason that I had opened up this tool in the first place, the picture of the mother and child intrigued me.

The Image Archive is a collection of old photographs that can add a fascinating visual element to any ancestor research that we do. I use them for providing me with town scenes, places of work and so on where a person may have lived, as well as the churches they may have been baptised, married or had a funeral service within. The resource, however, also contains images of people and in this case the young mother with her child was the British actress Gladys Cooper and her son John Buckmaster, who also grew up to be an actor. There were more pictures of Gladys Cooper in the Image Archive including single portraits of her plus some with her daughter, Joan Buckmaster, as a child. Joan would also grow up to act and she would marry the famous actor Robert Morley. The Morleys’ eldest son and Gladys Cooper’s grandson was Sheridan Morley, the author and critic who died in 2007.