So a recent Internet advertisement promoting old aerial photos of rural homesteads and farms around the nation grabbed his attention.

Stovall, who runs a dairy farm on 250 acres in Ila, responded to a Craigslist ad for historic aerial photographs. The advertisement promoted Vintage Aerial, an Ohio-based company that has bought and digitized more than 25 million film images taken of rural American home sites since the early 1960s and makes them available through an online archival service, www.vintageaerial.com.

"I called (Vintage Aerial), and we went from there," said the 48-year-old Stovall, who says his great-grandfather, James Thomas Stovall, bought the Ila property sometime in the late 1890s or early 1900s. Mark Stovall's grandfather was born on the farm in 1902.

During his initial conversation with Vintage Aerial, company representatives asked Stovall to provide his farm's street address, and then told him an archivist would get back with him after conducting a search for photos. The search service is free.

When the Vintage Aerial librarian called back a few days later, he told Stovall they had found a couple of rolls of film taken around 1988 of the area in Madison County. They set up a phone interview and photo review about two weeks later to look at the film over the Internet. During the phone interview, the Vintage Aerial archivist posted the images from the rolls of film on the company website, while Stovall looked at them on his home computer.

"The first roll was 4 or 5 miles from my home, but on the next roll I could see where the plane flew (along the road), and the roll of film went frame by frame until it got to my place," Stovall said.

Stovall was pleasantly surprised when he found the picture, especially since he has another similar aerial shot that was taken of his family's farm about 10 years earlier. The older photograph is a color print and hangs framed in his office, though he isn't sure where his family obtained it.

Stovall ordered a 16-by-23-inch black-and-white print of Vintage Aerial's 1988 photo of his farm. With an oil brush finish and framed, the print cost about $350, Stovall said.

An 8-by-12-inch image costs $100 and the largest photo costs about $400. All purchased Vintage Aerial photos are printed directly onto sturdy, acid-free, fine art-quality photographic boards, which eliminates the need for a glass cover and avoids fading or deterioration. Choices for wood frames include finishes in oak, cherry and black.

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Seeing family's roots

Getting the farm images that are decades apart will help Stovall compile a historical picture of the family homestead, he said. He's even hired another aerial photographic service to get current shots of his farm.

"(Having these aerial photos) means quite a bit because it is our property and it looks different from the air than it does from the ground," Stovall said. "It helps date things as they change and marks the passage of time, and it's kind of like this is me and my family and I want to document it for later generations."

One significantly noticeable difference between the late 1970s aerial photo and the 1988 image is that the older photo shows two gray concrete silos standing together, while the more recent shot pictures three, including a taller, blue metal structure. Currently, only the blue silo remains.

The Stovall family originally grew cotton on most of the Madison County farm until the early 1960s, but also had cows, chickens, a garden and all the trappings of a traditional farm, Stovall said.

"My father said they only purchased at the store what they couldn't grow or make on their own," he said.

Over the years, the farm was worked by Mark Stovall's great-grandfather, James Thomas Stovall; then by Mark's grandfather, George Nelson Stovall; then Mark's father, Thomas Nelson Stovall; and now by Mark Stovall.

Documenting a family's roots or the history of community homesteads is becoming more and more important as development and nature change America's rural landscapes, said Paul Clark, Vintage Aerial's technology director.

"Sadly, many of these old homesteads no longer exist due to deterioration, destruction and development," Clark said. "That's the miracle of our archive. What is being lost to nature and society is being preserved via technology."

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Jogging memories

"These photos bring back a lot of memories," said Ralph Lloyd, a Watkinsville man, who serves as one of a handful of Vintage Aerial archivists who help people from all across the country look for their homesteads. "They are looking back at something they thought they would never see again, and in a lot of cases doesn't exist anymore."

As an example, Lloyd cited the Lake Oconee area, which was rich farmland and rural homes before 1979, when the Wallace Dam was completed on the Oconee River and created the 19,000-plus-acre Lake Oconee.

"There was a lot of property around Lake Oconee before the lake came, and it's all disappeared," Lloyd said. "Those homes and farms are some of the things people love to see because there's no way you'll ever see that again."

It still might be difficult to find photos from the Lake Oconee area because much of the film taken of Georgia's rural countryside doesn't date back much further than the 1980s, Lloyd said. Vintage Aerial did recently purchase some archives of South Georgia that are older than the 1980s, he said.

Most of the people Lloyd has contacted to help search the Vintage Aerial archives have gotten excited about the process, even if they don't find their family's home, he said.

"In some cases we can't find the old homeplace, but they do see old stores and churches that were there when they were growing up and they get excited to see them as they were."

Many of those old buildings are long gone, replaced by highways or shopping centers, Lloyd said.

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Mapping it out

One of the keys to tracking down photos is having the physical address or at least the old highway names for the locations being sought, Lloyd said. Sometimes it can take two to three weeks of reviewing maps to find the corresponding rolls of film that help pinpoint the address, he said. The film is categorized by state, counties and road, so having at least a street name helps.

"It's more convenient with a street address, but if I can have a road name, we can just go through more rolls of film," he said.

The company may have 10 rolls of film taken of homes along Hog Mountain Road in Oconee County, and Lloyd can guide a client through all those, hoping they can tell by certain landmarks when they are getting close to the site. With an address, he probably can narrow the search down to one roll of film, he said.

The company also is using Google Earth to try to get the rolls of film overlaid on maps and make it easier to find old homesteads, but also to point out on the website the individual farms and homes that already have been identified, he said.

So far, Lloyd has helped about two dozen local people and found most of the locations they sought. Because of the Internet's reach, though, he is able to help people all across the nation and has had several inquiries from Ohio, where Vintage Aerial is based and where the aerial photography service first started.

Already, Vintage Aerial has identified 387 properties for clients in Ohio. Those can be seen on the company's Explore application on its website.

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Building an archive

Vintage Aerial was founded in December 2009, but the company's own roots grew out of a 1952 cottage industry that began selling door-to-door a service offering rural residents aerial photos of their farms and homes, said Ken Krieg, director of sales for Vintage Aerial. Other small flying services around the country pursued the same type of service.

"My wife's father, Gale Astles, started State Aerial, which had 16 airplanes and pilots flying year-round and who began taking pictures in 1952," Krieg said.

State photographed 16 million images, which Vintage Aerial licensed, Krieg said. Vintage Aerial licensed an additional 9 million images from other services. The original 25 million photos were contained on 700,000 rolls of 35mm black-and-white film.

The earliest images in the archive date back to 1962, because the first 10 years of film were lost to age or water damage or weren't kept at all, Krieg said.

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Turning to the Internet

The increased access to public records and a growing interest in genealogy has more people researching their family histories. Noting that trend and knowing about the treasure trove of aerial photographs, Aerial's goal was to make America's largest privately owned photographic library of aerial images easily accessible, offering Internet access to view photographs with help from the trained librarians.

"We want to be a part of that process," Krieg said in a news release. "We want to expand it beyond written documents, to include a striking visual record of the special places in a family's history, the places that inspire memories and conversations with the younger generations about their ancestors and their heritage."

To help with building a historical record to enhance the pictures on Vintage Aerial's website, clients and even those who search the site are encouraged to add their memories of a location they see, Lloyd said.

"We also try to get them to tell us the history and we are putting that in with the archives," Lloyd said. "Once we have sold a picture, we try to put a story with it and highlight it on the map."

The Explore link on the Vintage Aerial website allows users to select an area of the U.S., then zoom in to a specific county and town. The map highlights locations of aerial photos that have been tagged. A comments windows allows users to add information. The Explore link also contains several thumbnail images of farms or homes with personal histories from the people who bought the photos.

Lloyd has been so busy in his new job as a Vintage Aerial librarian he hasn't had time to search for his own family farm in Tennessee.

"There were seven kids in my family who grew up in the 1940s on a farm in Wartburg," he said. "I know all my family wants me look for that, but I haven't had time to do that yet. I know it's not there anymore."

Summary