Value of old photos—priceless!
c. 1932
In the past few months, I’ve begun the process of digitizing old family photos, a process I foresee will take me at least 20 years. I have thousands of my own negatives from the seventies and eighties, and I’d like to scan several hundred of them. I haven’t even begun those yet.
The main gold mine of all our family photos are in the old albums, some going back to the early part of the twentieth century, whose contents are held in place with four “corners” glued to the page. I’ve long been fascinated by historical photos of any type, but to see family members in the context of their early years, full of hope and promise, is especially meaningful.
Some of them are a real hoot.
This one is my maternal grandfather, taken around 1897. Look at those curls! Wonder if it’s an early version of a “mullet”? I think he was from around Monroe City, Missouri.
Here’s three generations from around 1931 on my father’s side—the gent on the left emigrated to New York from Ireland when he was 10, later heeding the call from Horace Greeley to “Go West, young man”, and got as far as St. Louis. He named his son Horace after Greeley.
This one is included because of the technique—-and today’s photographers think the camera “tilt” is something new and refreshing! Well, it at least goes back to 1935 or so, which is when this photo was taken. Guy on the right is the curly haired kid from the second photo.
This is my uncle, in a pose from around 1940 that really sums him up! My mother said she didn’t see how her brother landed my Aunt Mae, that he told her he was rich and had a good job. Aunt Mae allowed as to how she fell for it, but was awfully glad she did. He had a heart of gold, and they were married around fifty years until he passed away. He sure could talk, and here he looks like he has the confidence to talk anyone into anything!
I love old cars, and back in its day, I’m sure this new early 40’s Dodge was quite impressive. My mother inherited the car later, and the memory that sticks out in my mind about it was the night it caught fire as we were heading down the highway. Turned out to not be that bad (just the muffler dragging the asphalt), but the people who pulled up next to us with their windows rolled down, yelling “Your car’s on fire, your car’s on fire!” sure left an impression on me.
Kids are kids no matter what the generation, and this photo seems timeless to me. Except for the black and white, the hair style, and clothes, it could be a high school kid posing with her boyfriend’s photo at Forrest Park in 2008. It’s from around 1945.
Which is about the year I’m up to so far in my scanning. Only 60 more years of photos and negatives to go through—some of the memories are real, some only imagined. They aren’t necessarily the types of photos that professional photographers would think were valuable, but for those of us with personal connections to our old family records, these are the kind that are priceless!
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It’s a great idea to digitize all your old photos. Just think how much more flexible a photo is once it’s in the computer. Rather than languishing away in some forgotten shoebox for years, these photos have new life. You can share them online with friends and family (and Blog Zone readers) who might never have been able to see them, or even known they existed. You can organize them in new ways, creating new albums, or even incorporating them into videos. You can tag and archive these photos to make it easier for future generations of your family to learn more about their ancestry.
Sadly, I fear that generations from now, people won’t have as many photos of their ancestors back in the early 21st Century (us!) because, unlike photographic prints that are durable and lasting, electronic photos are merely computer files, and therefore ephemeral. How many people don’t print their photos anymore, but only store them on their PC — that can be wiped out by a virus, or the hard drive can die, or it can become outdated and replaced by a newer model? How many of you reading this would lose precious and irreplaceable photos of your children if your computer crashed tomorrow? Even if people religiously burn a copy of their photos for “safekeeping,” imagine, in 20 years, finding a shoebox of unlabeled CDs, or worse, floppy disks, that supposedly contain photos in some long-dead file format. It’d be better to find a shoebox of old prints!
So yes, while digitizing old photos is a good idea, we must be mindful of the fact that we owe it to our future generations to carefully archive these photos so they don’t fall into a digital black hole. And archiving digital files for long-term storage is a whole new topic…
Thank you for sharing your wonderful photos. I am an avid scrapbooker and take many many photos myself. I do have all of my photos printed instead of storing them on the computer because of the reasons stated by Dave. I haven’t convinced my husband of this though. I have read many horror stories in my scrapbooking magazines of what can happen to stored photos!
Great photos. Thanks for sharing them.
This is a good idea. I scanned all my families old fotos, and burned them to CD’s, and put them in a safe deposit box. Just in case of flood, tornadoe or fire, I will allways have a copy of them to have replacement prints made.
THE PICTURES ARE GREAT. ANY INFO AVAILABLE ON HOW TO DO THIS. WOULD APPRECIATE HELP.
Dave, thanks for the reminding us all about backing up our photos. Surprisingly, I haven’t really done that. I know all the things you’re saying about photos getting lost in a black hole are right, and that will be a top priority of mine—–backup, and backup a couple of more times. I think I’ll backup in three places—-an external hard drive, online storage (like .mac) and dvds in a safety deposit box.
I like the idea of printing them out, but in reality probably won’t ever get around to it. I bought a digital photo frame that stores several hundred photos, and you can organize the folders into different “albums”.
Joan, if you’re asking how to get your family photos in digital form, there are different ways to do it. The cheapest device is a multipurpose printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. I got an Epson unit for about $250 a couple of years ago, and it really does a good job of scanning in prints and converting them to jpegs. I scan my photos in at 300 dpi, generally 10 inches wide (or deep if it’s a vertical), which is probably overkill, but if I ever wanted to print some out, the digital file is big enough to make a really nice print. If your original photo is smaller (some of mine were 3×5’s) you probably need to steer fairly close to the original print size.
I used an Apple computer that came with the program “iphoto”—-it allows you to store prints according to subject, date, etc, in a really nice organized fashion. And, you can do slide shows, set it to music, then burn to a dvd, then play it back on your dvd player and television set.