Apr 15, 2014 07:42 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

The University of North Texas has acquired a collection of images, compiled by four generations of photographers, all belonging to one Fort Worth family.

Byrd Williams IV, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather took pictures for a living.

Morgan Gieringer, head of archives and rare books at UNT in Denton, said the collection includes more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives that documents more than 100 years of North Texas history including Fort Worth and Texas-Mexico border.

The materials are comprised of commercial and studio photography, western landscapes, events, portraits, architecture images, fine art photography, studio prints showing women at work during the 1930s, street scenes, portraits of gun crime victims, and televangelists among other subjects.

Family correspondence, artifacts, and a collection of cameras were also donated by Byrd Williams IV. The materials are housed in the reading room of the university's library and will be shared with a larger audience through exhibitions and publications.

Different photographic techniques have been used in the pictures of the Byrd Williams Family Collection, each unique to a particular photographer.

"It is a significant addition to our Texana and photography collections," Morgan said in a statement. The collection also features the archive of the Williams family photography studio in Fort Worth during the 1950s.  "If you or someone in your family had a photo taken at the studio, we may have that photo in the collection."

Besides documenting the history of Fort Worth and Texas in general, Gieringer said that the collection narrates the evolution of photography.

"Photography was only invented in the 1830s," Morgan said. "The Williams collection documents the history of photography as a growing way to capture and document our culture,"Lubbock-Avalanche Journal reports.

For Williams, Fort Worth has been his project since he was six. Williams captures everything from childhood races to fights at Fort William and elsewhere including Europe. He considers photography as a means to relive past life.

"I think the ultimate privilege or goal of any photographer is to share that archive forward," said Williams, a 62-year-old professor of photography and photography history at Plano-based Collin College.

"I'm not religious, but this is my religion," William said. "It has to do with the afterlife. It is a surrogate afterlife," Star-Telegram reports.

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