Family photo albums are life, frozen into moments, mundane or momentous. Death is a lived-through experience for everyone except the person who has died, so why not document it in the same album as the rest of the family history? Although it might seem morbid to us now, post-mortem portraiture began in the 1830s, just after the introduction of photography. In the early 20th century the practice began to dwindle, so in a way the photographs are quite an unusual find.