From the Archives: An RSM family album

We look at an album presented to the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain by Frederick G. Lyon in 1874.  Frederick Galliard Lyon (20 January 1818 – April 1887) was elected a Member on 2 June 1839 and was a Governor in the year he donated this volume.

A researcher and genealogist called Neill Reed came to the RSM in 2021 looking for information on two of his ancestors who were brothers: organist James Westbrook Reed (1828-1876) and cellist Robert Hopké Reed (1829-1914). After reading the files of these two Members we investigated a photograph album which had an image of William Henry Reed (1875-1942), although this man was unrelated to the first two Reeds.

The album piqued the interest of our genealogist as it is relatively unusual to find so many photographs of that era with identifications. Neill is a part of the England Project Team of WikiTree as well as an ambassador who promotes its worldwide use.

Neill has since been investigating each of the photographs in the “Lyon album” and the names behind them. The album contains images of 258 people, most of whom were working musicians and Members of the RSM. [The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain (wikitree.com)] 

He has looked into the RSM’s physical paper files relating to the Members who are immortalised in the images, and has created new content for WikiTree. The result of this has been to make the information available to other researchers and, from 1 March, this has extended the findings with a further 28 researchers currently undertaking to find connections and complete family connections, including references to other documents found elsewhere as well as through census records.

Initially the inputting of the 258 names from the album revealed that 30 were already to be found on WikiTree. Of the 228 not found at that moment Neill and team have created a further 82 new names on WikiTree in the last two weeks. All have a “biography” constructed from credible sources, such as the many documents consulted in the RSM’s archives.

Please do browse the findings made to date. Below is a screenshot of one page which will soon have further family connections.