Christine's father was a Sergeant Major. At home, his military instincts didn't entirely disappear: he would make all nine children march around the house because he genuinely wanted them to learn how to march.

Then there's the story of how her parents got together. Christine's mother was originally employed by her father to help look after his children. Eleven months later, Christine was born - an arrangement Christine now describes, with considerable amusement, as her father getting "a housekeeper with benefits".

These are the sorts of family stories that rarely make it into official histories. They're funny, imperfect, deeply personal - and often tucked away inside the memories attached to an old photograph.

The stories photographs leave behind

As Christine looks through the family archive, the photographs become a way back into a childhood and the relationships within it.

Because a family photograph rarely tells the whole story.

It doesn't record the noise in the room, the personalities, the arguments, the jokes or the things everybody in the family understood without needing to say. Those survive in the people who remember them.

Christine's story is a portrait of one large family, but also a reminder of how much of our family history lives not in photographs themselves, but in the stories we tell about them.

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