Edward Gersh stands in front of the Sphinx while serving in Egypt during World War II.

Lynden Steele mentioned in a recent post that family photos are often thought to be the first thing you save if your house is on fire. Well my house never burned down but my family did start going through old photos not too long ago.

A few years ago, my grandfather, Ed Gersh was getting very sick. Only a few weeks before I left to spend a semester in Shanghai, he had a stroke in his home. We were all thankful he survived but it was clear his health was deteriorating.

Now that I was about to lose my grandpa, I realized I didn’t know much about his life. Being a photographer, I went straight to the old boxes of photos and slides that resided somewhere in our basement.

I started scanning images that I felt told a lot about his life. One I found (above) was from World War II when he served in Egypt for the U.S. Army. I found it fascinating to see how few people were around the Sphinx. It hadn’t become the tourist attraction that it is today.

Another image I found was of my grandpa with his mother, Elsie Jackson.

Edward Gersh standing next to his mother, Elsie Jackson.

Finding this photo solved part of a mystery for my family. My grandfather was young when his mother, Elsie, passed away. This was the first image anyone in my immediate family had seen of her. However, unwrapping the mystery may have opened a whole new one. Maybe we will never know what she looked like.

I took these scans along with some others to the hospital to show my grandpa. Although he didn’t seem fully aware of a lot, his reaction to the images was simply amazing. He was remembering his life.

After he passed away, my family discovered thousands of images stored in a closet at my grandpas home. There were fully loaded slide carousels, briefcases full of prints and many other random unsorted images. More history than I can handle!

We are looking into options like a bulk loading slide scanner or a company to digitize all of our film, slides and prints. The goal is for every branch of the family to have a disk (or many disks) with all of the family photos.

I now have his Fujica 35-EE Rangefinder that he probably shot many of the rediscovered images with. It’s a little piece of his life that I will always hold on to.