By: Rob Burt Have you ever heard the expression, “A picture is
worth a thousand words”? That is definitely true for family
history work. You can learn lots of valuable information from
family and historical photographs . . . as long as you interpret
them correctly. Take the following picture as an example. It is
a well-known photograph of Henry McCarty, alias Henry Antrim and
William H. Bonney—better known as Billy the Kid. For years,
historians, writers, and aficionados of the West used this image
to argue that the infamous Western outlaw was a minority in the
gunfighter community—a left-hander. This idea was so common that
a film titled The Left-Handed Gun on the life of Billy the Kid
and starring Paul Newman was released in 1958, and many history
books note that he was a southpaw. In this picture, the rifle
Billy is holding is a Winchester Model 1873. If you look closely
at the gun, the loading gate (where bullets are put into the
rifle) appears on the left-hand side of the gun. (See
highlighted area below