We inherited a very large framed picture of my husband and his many siblings and parents when his parents passed away. It didn’t fit in any way with the style of our home. I took a picture of it and played around with filters until I had a nice black and white picture. I uploaded it and had it printed on a nice (smaller) canvas frame that is now hung up in our home. Also - Ancestry.com lets you upload pictures. It’s possible if you upload it, eventually you may connect with distant relatives.
I like the idea of loading family photos onto Ancestry, if the ones you are unable to completely identify. Most of the time, more than one print is made of a portrait and distributed around to family and friends. These photos can be the link to identifying photos.
I thank my late grandmothers regularly for meticulously labeling family photos! It makes things so much easier.
FamilySearch is a free website (https://www.familysearch.org/). You just need to make a username and password, then you can search the family trees for your husband’s ancestors. If anyone has added photos, you’ll be able to see them.
@thumper1, if you still have those pictures, also inquire at a local or state university to see if their archives addresses area history in addition to that of the campus. My organization strives to find precisely the materials that you mentioned, the kind that don’t talk about our local celebrities. Others may feel likewise.
The comment to call or e-mail first is also well made. It’s often much easier for an archivist or a curator to set up an appointment with you or to have preliminary discussions remotely than for you to walk in with a box of materials. That way, you know whether you’ve contacted the right place, and we have some basic idea of what you might be bringing to us. We can also help to refer you to another organization that might be a better fit.
This is exactly how some pictures of my husband’s family showed up in a historical cookbook! Somehow the pictures had been submitted to the archives, and the cookbook writer pulled the pictures and added them to the book. The family is very happy that they are part of the cookbook.