My brothers and I have not spent enough time going through the photographs mom and dad had in their home. One of my brothers did send this rather poor quality picture (click on the picture to enlarge it). This was taken about 1900 in front of the home of my paternal grandmother. A notation on the back of the picture says that is her on the horse, but doesn't identify the others. Since she had five sisters we've presumed they are next to her, with her father by the horse and her mother to the right. The other four male figures are a total mystery. Grandma was born in 1888 so I'm guessing at the date of the picture based on that. There is one other, studio quality photograph of the six sisters at my youngest brothers home, and a tinted oval photograph of this home. I've learned the house still stands a little over a hundred miles from here, so I'm going to take a drive up that way just to see it.
One of the photos I have here is the entire highschool classes 1929 - 1932 on the front step of the old high school in the town where I was raised. My mother is on the front row of that picture, dad is on the back row, near dad is my uncle, and my grandfather who was custodian of the school at that time, is standing to the right of the picture. I was able to acquire a list of the names of all but one of the people in that picture, and most of the adults I knew growing up are in the picture somewhere. Dad's best friend is next to him in the picture. After school that friend joined the Navy and eventually was Quartermaster on Admiral Byrd's ship during his South Pole expedition. One brother has a letter written to my parents while he was on that expedition and it has a large cancellation stamp on it identifying it as originating on Adm. Byrd's South Pole expedition.
Old photos are fun to browse through, especially when they directly relate to you own past, ancestry and the like.
posted by Fish-2 at 5:28 AM
5 Comments:
That is so cool!.. It's to bad so much history is lost because of lack of information. My oldest son is currently recovering and transferring a bunch of my fathers old photo's that are slowly fading away. When he puts them on DVD's he's adding captions about what there about. He's been working on it for 2 years, and has got just over 2000 out of 5000 images complete..... it's a heck of a lot of work, but he's fascinated with the history.
I love all of those old pictures - it just goes to show how important documentation is - even with our pictures now. Write down who is in them even if you think it is obvious. 50 years from now your great-grandchildren won't know who that other guy is.
I need to sort our family photos. Most of them are in shoe boxes!
I love those old pictures too. I have one of my grandfather at age two with wringlets in his long hair and a white dress on! Weird, especially since he grew up to be a very large and rugged man who farmed all of his life. I still can't figure out why any mother would want to dress her son up as a girl, but have been told that back then many people did that with their toddlers. Sheesh!
I sure wish my mother had had more respect for old photos. She threw most of them away when she moved out of her house into an retirement home.
Yes, I've gone through most of our old photos with my mother and noted ON THE BACK with "acid free" photo pens who was who. I've also scanned most so they live in a digital world but that doesn't give you any info from the front.
Great photo you've got there.
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