Not Just Nuclear: Families are elders long buried and generations yet unborn
I have become the self-appointed steward of the family photo archive after my aunt pulled a suitcase stuffed with photos out from under the bed in the spare room in her trailer.<p>The suitcase&#x27;s original owner, another aunt, &quot;Aunt&quot; Faye, had lived to be 103 years old but had never had children.<p>And so I got to work scanning I believe over 500 photos — the earliest a tin-type from 1890 or so. Many were then cleaned up in Photos — levels adjusted, scratches and imperfections &quot;healed&quot; digitally. In time I was able to scan more photos from the family and increase my collection. Likely over 1000 now.<p>Some photos had something written on either the front or back and I also dutifully added metadata to the digital photo describing the text written.<p>At this time too, I had begun doing some genealogy on Ancestry.com.<p>As I pored over the photos, trying to determine who was in the photo, where the photo was taken, I began to &quot;know&quot; the people — family dead even before I was born. I could recognize them then. It became easier to approximate the date of the photos too: looking for young relatives in the photos, guessing their apparent age, knowing when they were born from my genealogy.<p>Eventually they began to sort: first a young Gertrude standing awkwardly in the tin-type as a child, another studio photo and she&#x27;s about to become a teen, then with her sisters as a young woman, married, with her own children, in her new dress, with her daughter and her daughter&#x27;s husband, on vacation, with her grandchildren, white-haired with her daughter - now old herself. Finally her headstone.<p>Entire lives, captured in photographs. And interleaved with the children they gave birth to, who too grew old in photos and also died — and in one case leaving, as it were, a suitcase of these photos that would come to me.<p>The connectivity of family back past 100 years has never been made so real to me as it has through photos. Maybe I should have been able to see that continuity in the absence of family photos but there they are.<p>And as I get older I do consider more and more those not yet born. I suppose this digital legacy is one obvious example. I have been spreading the photos as far and wide as I can, not just to far flung relatives but also to Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave.com, etc. Surprisingly, I have already had relatives I did not know existed reach out to me having stumbled upon some of these photos on Ancestry and Find-A-Grave.<p>Family photo calendars I created for a few years were sent to two dozen relatives. I have a &quot;family photo album&quot; I am now assembling — I hope to have it done in a year or so and print a few dozen through Lulu.com or similar and send those out to as many relatives who want them as well.