Those Old Snaps

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Our last week's chat about grandmothers sent me on a frantic search through boxes in my attic.  I did not have a single picture of my dear grandmother that I could put my hands on. We used to have quite a few framed family photos in our central hall and our stairwell, but when we painted a few years ago I took everything down and stuck them in boxes--which ended up in the attic. As did most of our dozens of old photo albums. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of storage space in our big old house, except in the attic--which is HOT in the summer. Not good news for photos, old sticky-paged photo albums, or, heaven forbid, the boxes and boxes of my parents' old slides. (Oh, and not to mention the fact that all this stuff, especially those old slides, are flammable. Yikes!)

Debs at 9 (I think)

Debs' brother Steve

Trolling through the mess, I came across a legal-sized envelope filled with loose photos. There was the only picture of my great-aunt Ruth as a young woman, and the earliest photo of my grandmother. And there was the ONLY photo of my dad's parents. There was a studio portrait of me, and another of my brother, that I didn't even remember.  And lots more, and that's without even starting on the albums. I thought, if I don't take care of these, they'll deteriorate beyond saving. And if I don't label these, no one will know who these people are...

A couple of years ago, I bought a little Canon photo scanner, and I've had a pile of acid-free photo albums for years--all untouched. I cannot figure out how to find the time, or to organize, this project, and yet it breaks my heart to see the past fade away, and people forgotten.

REDS, do you keep old photos? (You all seem to have handy photos to post.) How do you manage to do it?

And then there's the thought--now we are all digital, which I guess is better. But is it sad that we are leaving no physical record of our lives NOW?


HALLIE EPHRON: Fortunately for me my husband is diligent about printing photographs every so often and putting them in an album. When our library got a wonderfully fast scanner, he spent hours and hours in there scanning our old photographs and so we have most of the 'keepers' online (in Dropbox) as well. Digital is easier to share, and it makes a great Christmas gift to send a relative a carefully culled collection of old photos on a flash drive.

Hallie

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Can Jerry come to our house? Our photos are tragic. In boxes, and some in a few albums, totally inaccessible. Luckily I have a family photo gallery on the third floor hallway wall, and there are many on display, and I have three old albums--at least I know where they are. I do love actual photo-photos--they seem more real somehow, and I love how you can date them by the scalloped edges, or the fading color, or the weight of the paper. (How do people look completely different now?)  Yes, digital is great, although now we have thousands of photos of every darn thing.  And every event.  ("Where's that?" I'll wonder. Luckily the phone tells me.). And it's fun to flip through a family album. Sitting in front of a computer together is just not the same.

This is a photo of me with  my little  sister Nina at the Lincoln Park Zoo--circa 1954.  Someday, that will someone's old family photo. It makes me think--I should label the back.

Hank and Nina

LUCY BURDETTE: Oh gosh, we are desperately in need of Jerry too. I was looking at the boxes of loose photos in the bottom of my closet this weekend but like Debs, it feels like an overwhelming project. I have a small wedding album, and an album my mother made of me as a baby with cute captions, and a family album my father and I put together. But there are hundreds more--and yes, I  too am the keeper of many slides, and old reel movies from growing up--the kind that jerk around and make you dizzy to watch. And we have a video of our wedding, which I know is disintegrating.

Somewhere I read about a company that digitizes everything--you simply put the stuff in a box and send it to them. I'm having trouble even getting to that LOL! (Never mind finding out what they charge...)

Lucy watering

DEBS: You all were SO DARNED CUTE!!!!

Hallie, we need Jerry, too! Do you think he would come to Texas if we promised barbecue and tacos? Or margaritas?

Hank, yes, so interesting. Why do people look completely different now? I have a framed photo in my hall of my daughter at the same age as me in the photo above, and the whole feel is so different. 

And Lucy, for my daughter's last birthday I had all her childhood home videos put on DVD. It was hours and hours of stuff I can't even remember taking! And I don't even want to tell you how expensive it was. Shocking. But at least I can think I saved something for posterity.

How about you, readers? Do you save the old photos? Do you have a system for them? Or are you happy with the ephemera of digital? (Just thinking about video and floppy discs, which we thought were the ultimate in technology, now gone the way of the dinosaurs...)

PS Here's a bonus, one of the photos I found when I was looking for one for the grandmother post. This is my Nanny, holding a photo of me she's just unwrapped at Christmas. I'm guessing this was 1978, just before I left for Scotland to get married. And Rick had taken that photo as a going away present for me. Life is really weird sometimes, isn't it?