The Roadmaps of our Lives

By some estimates, there are somewhere between three and four trillion printed photographs out there. Some have little importance, either they are duplicates or out of focus prints or not the best depiction of the subject of the photo. Others are landscapes that look like so many other landscapes. Many fall into the "it seemed like a good picture at the time" category but if you've forgotten where you were or what was funny about putting your hands to your ears and acting like a moose. Those pictures really have very little value. Some not even worth the paper they're printed on.

But then, there are the gems. The ones that represent people, places or things that are an integral parts of your life life. They are our grandparents, our parents, our siblings, our grandchildren and every one of them, every time you see them, elicits an emotion inside you.

These photographs are the roadmaps of our lives. The list of what kind of photos would be special to each of us would be as long as a phone book. We keep them close to us--in wallets or in our offices, standing on shelves or hanging on walls of our homes. They are our treasures.

Unfortunately, few of us treat them as as the treasures they are. We too often banish them to boxes and then store them in locations where they can slowly deteriorate over a relatively short time. We keep them in places that can damaged by water, moisture, fire or the other environmental conditions that are out there.

Worse still, we all reach a time when those who might be able to identify everyone in a photograph or tell a story about the location are gone. Then what? We no longer have that part of our family's history. We have people that are standing near Grandma or Aunt Elizabeth that we can't identify. We don't know where the picture was taken or by whom. And, as such, they are gone. Images that no longer have any meaning to us.

Fortunmately, there is a way to avoid this. Scan them, digitize them, caption them and save them to DVD. You'll not only have the pictures for 50 years or more, you and your children and their children will know who the people in the photos are.

In my own life, I lost my father more than 30 years ago. I sometimes wonder whether my memories of him are of him in life or in the poses of the photos that are so familiar to me. I am so thankful I still have them. And I keep finding more. With every box of stored photos I open, I am treated to another, often forgotten chapter in my life. It's a visual history of my family and of my growing up.

It is as important to me as any history book has ever been.