These People are in My Family?

It was part laughter and part sad irony. I found a whole bunch of photos of my family that were 70 or 80 years old. They were black and white of course and some were on extremely thick cardboard paper while others were little Polaroids. It was like looking at a series of museum photos until I realized that they were family members of mine.

I didnt know who they were, although some had writing on them so I could kind of build the structure of the photos. My family came here from overseas around 1900 and these photos were old enough that I couldnt be sure whether they were from here in the US or before they made the trip.

I wondered who these people were and what their lives were like. How much more simply they seemed to live. They lived a harder life than their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. But it was a lot simpler.

Did they really dress like that? What was attractive to each other? My grandmother's parents sure looked stern and I cant imagine how they had a whole lot of fun. What did they do before radio, tv or computer? Hard to know because there is no record of their thoughts or dreams. I dont even know who most of those people are, but I have a cousin who might be able to identify them.

I scanned them and will label them if I find out who they are. I don't like thinking that the generations disappear. I prefer to think that my kids and their kids will be able to appreciate the fact that they are part of our extended family with these unnamed and unidentified people at the helm. But if our pictures are never scanned, we will lose them to deterioration or to the inability to idenify them.

I honor my grandparents, I remember them very well. But it will probably end there as there are not enough photos of my grandfather to make a case for him to my own kids.

We do a great job with creating digital memories. There is so much content that I believe the generations that follow us will have plenty of content to play around with. And they'll have a wide array of media where family histories can be housed. But the first wave of photos? They are endangered. There are somewhere between three and four trillion photos out there and many of them have been lost to irrelevance. I want to make sure I can stop that wherever and whenever I can. I want to nurse and nurture my little family tree,