I stared at it for a while. I think it could be the same man, but I'm not certain. If you zoom in and just look at features individually, they're not so different as to discount it.

As for family resemblance, I couldn't say exactly what it was, but when I first looked at my photograph, I did sort of feel that yes, he does look like he could be a relative. He definitely wouldn't look completely out of place anyway.

But then how much can you really tell, he is my dad's mum's mum's mum's mum's dad - there's a six generation gap. Say I am exactly 50% my dad's gene's and he's 50% his mum's, and so on, then logically I am less than 1% JBG's genes. So any resemblance could be coincidental in any case!

As for certification, I literally only have the info that came with it from the Nattional Archives. Interestingly, it was copyrighted literally days after Geoghegan's death, which makes me think it most likely is of him - a savvy photographer trying to cash in on anyone wanting to use the photograph for obituaries etc, perhaps?

I'm wondering if you could perhaps get your photograph dated Joan, as this might give you more of a clue. I spoke to someone at Who Do You Think You Are Live last year, and she confirmed that my photograph was late 19th century, so probably taken in the few years before Geoghegan died. To my untrained eye, yours does look like an older photograph, but how much older and whether that would tally up with the age difference I couldn't even begin to guess.

I would observe that they are dressed very similarly - they could be wearing the same jacket! I'm not sure whether that's helpful or not - I don't know how much the style of a man's jacket would be likely to change over that sort of time span.