The finality of death feels impossible to grasp. I think of this with my parents who are in their 90s and live on the other side of the world. I also think of it with my own children - how do you say goodbye when you’re the one leaving?
I love the story these photographs tell. I’m an avid archiver of our family’s photos.
The other thing I did was to interview my parents 20 years ago to document their life experience in one go from their perspective (separately, because they are different).
Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now. It’s never to late to start and they might bring comfort both today and when you wave your last goodbye.
My grandparents died recently. They were born in the 1920s. Cleaning out their house I discovered countless letters, photo albums and diaries that I had no idea existed. I regret not asking them for permission to go through their stuff while they were still alive. I think they would have said yes - and there would have been many, many interesting conversations. I have read many biographies. But going through their things I can see how much there was to learn from them. And I did learn a lot from them - but some things just never came up, because they had forgotten and I didn’t know what questions to ask.
Growing up, my father was estranged from his family. My mother told me his mother and father emotionally and physically abused him. He moved out of the house at 15 and we only saw them twice a year. Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was usually a few hours and then we were shuffled out of there really fast. By contrast, my mother's family was huge, we had massive gatherings at almost every holiday and all the adults would play cards and chat and we'd be there for hours on end before leaving. My mother's side was a very close knit Scandinavian family.
One of the things I knew about my father was that he was avid stamp collector. He called me last year and told me it was time for him to give up his collection as his eyes were getting worse and he didn't have the concentration to catalog his stuff any more.
I came over on a Fall Sunday afternoon last year. He sat down with them and told a very long story about how he got into stamp collecting and about ten minutes in I realized this was something incredible. I had was about to get a rather long, involved history of his family which I never had known before. I took out my phone and turned on the live transcribe. We took several breaks going through his collection and some other stuff like coins he inherited from my grandfather on my Mom's side.
It was completely insane the story he told. His great grandfather was forced into the German military during world war one. He hopped off the troop train at the first stop and fled into the forest. He made his way to the coast where he jumped a steamship bound for the US. He was terrified the Germans were still after him so he continued West after landing in New York until he reached Minnesota. That was just the beginning of the story, but I am eternally grateful for being able to hear him tell so many crazy stories about his life and his family that I never knew. I've saved that transcription and will be sharing it with the rest of my family this Christmas.
I had the same reaction, all this stuff was just incredible that I never knew and had the very same feeling that there was so much I learned in those stories he told, so I am eternally grateful he shared that with me. For me, it was absolutely priceless. My wife has told me multiple times how fortunate I am I took the time to go see him and those stories were not on the list of things I expected to happen.
I’m sure where that story came from, there will be many more.
I’d recommend recording the audio instead of doing live transcription. You can always transcribe it later. Any transcription you run five years from now is probably going to be way more accurate than anything you can run on your phone today. Plus, this way, you also preserve his voice and any nuances.
I've been thinking about this too so thank you for the recommendation. I like the idea of having his voice and inflections in the way he tells a story that give the information way more depth.
I also wish I'd spent more time trying to get my parents to talk about the early parts of their lives. Only one grandmother lived until I was old enough to think of this, but I didn't think to do it with her either :(
I also am the avid family photo archiver (I scan them, tag them, release them).
The oldest photo I have is a tintype of a young girl around 1882 or so. She is maybe two years old — and is my great grandmother.
I never met her, she had died before I was born. But I have studied her in the photos going all the way back to that tintype of her — somewhere in Missouri. Photos show her with her sisters and parents not long before they died, working in the fields, married to my great grandfather, with her children. Her children become adults and at some point it is clear that the daughter's role has reversed and she is taking care of mom. Great grandmother is soon old and so frail looking. And then there is a photo of the headstone for her.
It has been a little sobering, as "photo historian" for the family, seeing the arc of lives lived and now gone.
Mind sharing your process? While my parents are still around, I want to digitize the hundreds of photos they have of the previous generations while we can still identify them. It seems like a daunting task!
I have a EPSON flatbed scanner and use Apple's Image Capture to scan them in.
Smaller photos (3 x 5 or smaller) I scan at 600 DPI, larger (5 x 7 or larger) maybe 450 DPI or so. I'm trying to capture enough detail that I could reprint them, perhaps even larger than the original, and not have reached the pixel level.
I pull the scans into Apple's Photos and immediately tag them all with "Family Photos" keyword or similar to make finding them easier later.
Then it's adding keywords for who is in the photo (if I know). If anything was written on the front or back I type those in the Description. If I know the date I change the date of the photo. If I don't know the date at all I also keyword the photo "Wrong Date".
If I know the year I set the date to "1/1/YEAR". If I know the month and year (some Polaroids would print this on the border of the photo) I set the date to "MONTH/1/YEAR".
Sometimes the photo was labeled as someone's birthday or on Christmas so I can get the day as well.
Finally, I also edit the photos — adjust levels, remove scratches, etc. Again in Photos. I tend to only spend significant time on the important photos, or ones I like.
But as you said, daunting. Nonetheless, I can export the photos and send them around to family, post to Ancestry.com, etc. And all the metadata is retained on export.
I have retouched many photos such that I was able to print them and have a photo that was better than the surviving print (possibly even a touch better than the print when it was new).
It has been worth it for me. I have observed the changes in consumer camera quality, figured out who people are who were strangers to me before (I can recognize many now when I come across a photo I had not before seen).
A family photo I restored, my great grandmother is top-right (probably end of the 19th Century):
I considered sending the prints to a company that scans them. I was in LA at one time and toured their offices. Ultimately, I decided to use Photo Scan (an iOS app by Google - not sure if it’s still around).
I grouped photos by general time range and bulk added date/time and location information - knowing it wouldn’t be perfect.
It wasn’t terrible and I got a couple hundred photos scanned in a weekend.
I finished digitalising my analog photos (that was only a few albums, I got a digital camera around 14 years of age) and sorted them then made both my mum (early sixties) and my grandma (mid eighties) a set on a digital photo frame (along with copies of some of my digital photos). Those frames are a bit pricy and will need a techie to setup, but the gifts were very well received.
I would have done that with my other grandma, but we grew apart and then dementia destroyed what was left of her. I will likely digitalize her photo collection when she is moved to a retirement home.
As others have said, you should also get their stories on camera on as a recording, if possible. There will come a time where this is no longer possible.
> Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now.
Is not just for nostalgia. I would've loved if my parents recorded even just a few minutes of their grandparents or great-grandparents to pass them to my children.
You’re right. I have a video recording of a my grandparent talking on the porch of his home in India where my parents grew up. He was describing the elephants that roamed the area and how he and his siblings would help tend the land. Truly a treasured clip treasured if my children’s great grandparents.
I love the story these photographs tell. I’m an avid archiver of our family’s photos.
The other thing I did was to interview my parents 20 years ago to document their life experience in one go from their perspective (separately, because they are different).
Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now. It’s never to late to start and they might bring comfort both today and when you wave your last goodbye.