Tossing a Few More Photos

I feel justified tossing inherited photos like this one.

 

 

This is Grandma L's front yard.  The stump had sentimental value for her because it was made by a live Christmas tree that graced her front room when her kids were . . . well, I'm not sure how old they were, but they were all living with her.  They had live Christmas trees two years in a row and planted them both in the front yard in a time before the street had sidewalks. 

 

This is, I believe, the tree that wasn't planted with the pot.  There were some casual mentions made about why one of the two trees was so much taller and bushier than the other.  The short one had been stunted for several years until someone got curious enough to go digging and discovered that the poor thing was pot bound. 

 

I don't mind keeping the story, but (sorry Grandma) I'm not keeping a picture of a sentimental stump.  I've got lots of shots of people standing in front of the actual trees.  That's enough to keep the story in mind. 

 

 

 

OK, Grandma.  You got me.  If you stand one of my kids on the stump, I'll keep that picture.  Well played.  



If You Love Your Children LABEL YOUR PHOTOS!!!

I Have sorted, scanned, and labeled photos - an indeterminate trickle of them.  I tossed a couple dozen duplicates.  I have also filled in several slots on the family tree from notes on the back.  I enjoyed that.  

In line with the title of this post, I've also found many more photos that are unlabeled and unidentified.  They were added to the folder labeled "Who the Hell Are These People?"  I may have to visit relatives to see if someone else can place a name to some of them.  Oh, the horror! 

And speaking of horror, 

I've decided that this photo went unlabeled due to the enduring shame of a recurrance of toddler cannibalism in the gene line.  The horror, I say!

The Last Two Boxes . . .

     . . . are very densely packed. 


This is going to take awhile.  And it's going to take some research after all the sorting and scanning.  These are the boxes with the really old photos.  The ones that came glued to a cardboard backing, to make them more like paintings. 

I don't feel so bad about unidentified adults.  I figure the burning question, "Who the hell are these people?" will be answered eventually. 

But the unidentified babies may be forever orphaned.  Sigh.



I Think I'm Keeping It For The Mystery

It's in one of those holders that are like cardboard frames, the old kind that are really heavy and make you think that this must be something important just from the heft of it.

 

 

They don't make cardboard like that, these days.  And there's not a whiff of a name attached to this photo.  Not on the back, and not inside, either.

 

This is an unknown, mystery person.  And look at that hair.  Who goes to a professional photographer, dressed up, with a tie, with hair like that? 

 

I can't throw him away. 

 

 

I believe I tossed the paper insert of Elizabeth Taylor, though.  Although I sometimes wonder if anyone out there collects these old frame inserts.  I also wonder how many families are like mine.  We apparently have a tendency to keep the advertising insert that came with the frame, just putting our picture over it.  Sometimes, if the insert is glossy, we'll turn it around so that the surface against our photo has less chance of absorbing moisture and sticking to it.

 

When I do it, it's out of laziness.  I'm usually not near a wastebasket or recycling bin, and it's easier to leave it than to make a disposal trip after loading the frame.  Sometimes I wonder if others do it to add more cushioning to the layers.  I've put a lot of framed photos into files lately, and gotten rid of a lot of frames.  So I've seen a lot of these inserts.

 

Only one Elizabeth Taylor so far.  



Good Weekend

Had a good weekend.  More later.

Glee

It's been awhile, hasn't it. A couple of weeks back, I counted up the photos I had sorted and labeled that weekend, both in the computer and in hand. That is, they were the same photos. They had been previously scanned, and I labeled and sorted the photos while also labeling and sorting the scans in my computer.

There were 454 of them. It had been a three day weekend on one hand, but on the other, I hadn't worked continuously. That finished all of the photos that had been scanned over Christmas break.

At that point, the old scanning sleeve was scratched enough that the scanner was scanning the scratches more than the pictures, so I had to stop. I haven't been able to pry replacement sleeves out of either the manufacturer or Kodak. Their online customer service sucks.

I tried buying a new scanner, but can't find a simple one, like the old one at any local store. I tried online and found a larger version of the little scanner I was using. I just sent it back. The note I made on Facebook about it reads:

Bought a new scanner. Was all excited. Had hundreds of photos queued up to be scanned. Sucker doesn't work. Sending back. Repacking photos. Damn.

There is a picture. The problem with the scanner was that it wouldn't pull the photos through. So my Dear Son tried pushing them through, to see if that would work.

At least if they ever get the rollers to work, the scan part works fine.

I still have no scanner, so I've been pre-sorting and sometimes labeling more photos. There are still boxes and boxes in the garage.

The good news is that I've discovered that the best way to store the pictures is in index card archive boxes. The bad news is that I now have a box full of unscanned photos and no scanner. And for most of it, what I really need is just a new sleeve.

But that's not what I came here to say. I came to share the glee of finding 9 packets of pictures that could be thrown away with only the mildest of guilt. Wheee. They were Gerry's photos.

Gerry was my Mom's second husband. The photos didn't get thrown away automatically just because they were his. They got tossed because he would take a lot of pictures of, say, the view from someplace he had visited or from the property where he would build his house. But it wouldn't be labeled, so it would just be a bunch of overexposed trees, with a few fronts of trucks thrown in.

No people + no labels usually gets chucked no matter who took them. Oh, there was also a dead deer on a mule and what looked like damaged furniture. I'm guessing the first was from a hunting trip and the second was evidence for a claim against a moving company. Not much use for posterity, especially with no smiling hunters in any shot.

The pictures of fish all have smiling fishermen holding them. The ones with Gerry in them are being kept for now. I may toss them later, but I won't be able to toss them with guilt-free glee. And that's what I experienced last night, folks. Nearly guilt-free glee.

Old Style Photos - The Sixties

Does your family have these kind of pictures?

This is just the latest set I've found.  My parents also had each of us photographed when we were one year old.  They also were delivered as a Tube O' Photos. 

You may not know if your family ever purchased a Tube O' Photos, if your family happened to show foresight.  If the photos had been cut apart and put into frames or into a photo album, they would not have become set in their curl over the course of years.

This big long strip of photos is only laying partially flat because it's being stretched between a heavy diet vanilla steamer (not milk) and a box of photos.

Were you to reach into the photo and lift up that cup of milk, that strip would snap back into its tube shape fast enough to startle you.

The tube was taken in the early sixties.  So those unseparated pictures have been rolled up like that for fifty years.

These are my Uncle B's step children.  I don't remember their names.  I only met them once or twice.  I'd have been about eight and it was, as mentioned, about fifty years ago.  The marriage didn't last very long and while Uncle B was in it, they lived in San Jose, which was Somewhere Far Away to my eight year old mind.

I used to think that my parents had handled the Tube O' Photos years wisely.  They had taken each of us to be memorialized for posterity when we were one year old.  I knew that they had received a Tube O' Baby Faces for each of us.

But I had seen a few of the photos in frames, on the wall.  And I had been shown other photos, cut apart (as below) and laid flat in the cedar chest (a place of deep storage).

So, although they talked about the tube, I thought that they had done what was necessary to forestall the effects.  But, no.

Later I was to find that they had cut a few pictures loose, but had left the rest to fossilize in their tubitude.  True, Mom had gone back at one point, and cut one tube into three-picture sets, then laid that out in the cedar chest with things weighing them down. 

But the rest had been left to curl.  I wonder how widespread this is.  True, my parents and my uncle are only two instances, and they're related instances at that.  But I've inherited other tubes. 

I also wonder why photographers in the sixties would deliver photos in a tube like that?  Was it a recent change in technology, so that it looked new and modern?  Was it supposed to be cool, seeing all those faces in a line?  Were these the proof copies, with the tubeness implying that you'd get a nice flat picture if you paid the full price?

I don't know.  I only know that I've cut apart those photos.  And I'm flattening them out.  And I don't even know if I'll be throwing them out when I'm done.  Because I may never know these people's names and after fifty years there really isn't much of a connection. 

If You Love Your Children . . .

I gave a speech, once, with a recurring motif of "If you love your children: . . . "  (I'm a Toastmaster, I'm allowed to give speeches for no reason in particular.)  There were three sections to the speech.  The first was: Write a Will.  The second was: Prepay Your Funeral.  And the third was:  Have a Living Will or Medical Power of Attorney on File. 

These are important things.  If you do these things, your children will bless you.  Well, unless they're the sort who are always looking for drama, and you shouldn't be encouraging that anyway. 

But if you really love your children, you will LABEL ALL OF YOUR PHOTOS.  This applies particularly to photos that have been in a box under your bed for decades, photos that you never take out and reminisce and share stories over.  I may have to start a blog called:  Who The Hell Are These People?  (Yes, I did notice that I've written about this before.  The photos still aren't sorted and labeled, so the irritation continues.)
I will give Mom credit.  Last year she brought over two boxes of pictures and we labeled all of the photos that she could identify.  Unfortunately, she didn't bring the other four boxes, including the ones that she had inherited from her mother (and that were possibly inherited at least once before that).  Some of these people will never be identified.  Some of them might.  There's a chance that some were identified in other photos.  But a lot of my second cousins look very similar as toddlers.  If the whole family is in the photo, I can go by birth order, but singletons are mysteries.

Now to the guilt.  I felt very guilty when I started throwing away vacation photos.  At first.  As I got further and further into the box, I became almost gleeful.  It was liberating.  If it's just a photo of a mountain or a lake, with no person in it and no date and no clue who took the vacation, it's going.  Sorry.  Bye, bye.  If the people by the lake or the bridge are too small or too blurry to identify, it's going.  Postcards are going.  Joke postcards are being hurled into the waste bin.

I feel just a little guilty about some of these just because they were kept for so many years.  How do I know?  Well, after the fifth picture of Great Grandma B standing next to her car to show that she was on vacation, I started tossing those, too.  So they would have been hers, to start with (or Great Uncle L's - he lived with her for years, and may have taken the photos).  Then they would have been kept by Grandma B, then by my Mother.  I am breaking the chain.  Sorry.  I can get a better picture of that lake on the internet. 

I also feel a little sad about the milestone pictures and the way they accumulate.  There are multiple copies of my Mother's high school graduation picture, for instance.  Some are unsigned and others are dedicated to other relatives from her.  It's obvious that the photos went out, and then, over the decades, the relatives died and the copies slowly collected back.  I've been able to toss multiples of me and of my kids.  I haven't tossed one of Mom's graduation pictures, yet.  I may be able to find homes for them.  We'll see.

I'll write about other things that were collected some other time.  Hint:  you folks who started collecting pre-1964 silver coins from your pocket change when the sandwich coins came out made a good investment.  Buying coins as an investment doesn't work as well; but you folks who didn't pay anything but the time to roll them and the space to keep them came out nicely ahead.  Or rather, your kids will. 

Hoarding vs Archiving

It probably says a lot about me that the thing that finally goaded me into posting was a webcomic.  This is the first post in 2012.  My Mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March and she died of it on May 24.  I'm still not sure what to post about that.  I think I'll stick to her situation as regards the comic,

There are two things that are related.  One, from the time she started feeling bad*, she started going through all of the things she had accumulated, throwing things out, selling things at a flea market, and giving things away.  I really appreciate that.

Two, she sent two boxes of photos, a box of 8mm home movies, and a box of vinyl albums home with me in March.  She had already given me two boxes of photos, which we had gone through together and labeled, and I thought that was the last of them.  No.  There were still two large boxes under her bed filled with photos.  Some of them must have been ones she inherited when her mother, my Grandma B, died.

A fair bit of the inherited photos are not labeled.  I'm guessing that they were photos that Grandma B inherited when Grandpa B's mother died.  Grandma B was pretty good about labeling. 

Now I look at these pictures and have no clue who these people are.  One of them is on a small piece of glass, about 1.5" x 1.5", instead of on paper.  I suspect that I can identify some of them through the labeled pictures, but it's going to take awhile, and I have my Mother's estate to settle first. 

I think about the boxes of Grandma L's photos and letters that I still have to go through, and the box of Aunt D's things.  Now these.  Then I look at the webcomic and wonder if I'm archiving the family heritage or hoarding things for others to toss after I'm gone.  There's no way to know.  It will depend on whether anyone in my children's or grandchildren's generation becomes interested. 

Note to self:  Find Mom's Christmas Stocking pattern.  Learn to knit.

* the length of time it took her doctor to diagnose her is a completely different rant