Only picture...

I had the privilege of meeting a woman who has faced many challenges in her life. She realizes she is a stronger person because of the trials in her life and she is doing her best to make lemonade out of lemons. She doesn't have many mementos of her growing up years, in fact, she only has 1 picture of when she was a child. Here's the original, it was scratched, faded, stained and she didn't remember who the other child in the picture was and so she wanted her removed.

Being able to help people preserve their history is what it's all about. I love helping them save their photos.

4 generations

We all want to save those special memories we have so we can remember the experience in our lives. As we grow older, we experience more and things that we said we would never forget are moved to the back of our brain and it becomes harder to recall them. Capturing memories through pictures helps us to relieve those moments, and also bring back the emotions of the moment. We live in a society now where everything is recorded, selfies have become the norm. But in the film era, pictures were taken more sparingly and printed to hang on walls or to keep in albums that we looked at as often as possible. Family stories were shared with younger children as grandparents explained the pictures and children learned about their own histories. Not every family has the opportunity to have multiple generations pictures, but those that do cherish the pictures.  The picture was taken in 1963 and included great-grandma, grandma, mom and daughter as a means of including a visit of extended family.

While in pretty good shape, they wanted to be able to make a larger print. So I cleaned it up and was able to make prints in 8x10s. There is one other 4 generation picture that was taken a few years later and it was the last one because the great-grandma passed away in 1972.

The grandma passed away in 1989 and  the mom is now the grandma and the baby is now mom to 4 amazing children. The best the family can do is 3 generation pictures but those pictures are cherished as much as these 4 generation pictures. I love hearing the stories behind the pictures and hearing about families experiences, but I have to admit that I know so much about these pictures because I was the little baby in the pictures.

I'm just finishing up a project that has taken more hours than I want to count. I am helping a family digitize their family photos with some which go back to the early 1900's. Some of the family members are looking at the pictures and trying to identify and label the people. Time is of the essence because there are only 1 or 2 people surviving who might be able to identify some of the older pictures. Some pictures were labeled with names, dates and locations; but many were only labeled with the date or not labeled at all. I am hoping that we can identify the people in the pictures so we can recreate the portions of their life captured on film.

This project has made me think about my own family pictures and the importance of continuing to document my family history. Over the weekend, we celebrated our son's birthday and I made sure I got a picture of him with his grandparents. I'm trying to make sure I do that with each of the kids now because I don't know how many more opportunities I will have to take those family pictures. As I was going through old pictures with my mom, I found a couple of 4 generation pictures from when I was a child. I plan on restoring them and then printing them and hanging them in my home. What a treasure it is to be able to capture those precious memories. We need to take advantage of those chances when we can.Don't let the moments pass you by.