Shutter Sisters

Our Legacy in Photos

By

This is my great-aunt Sallie Myrtle Cook, born in 1896. I have just begun to start researching my family tree and I came across this photo of my great-aunt which I found online.  When I saw this photo for the first time, it hit me just how important old photos of any kind can be.  I myself have hundreds of old family photos going back to probably the 1930s, but nothing earlier.  Suddenly, the need to preserve my family photos is more important than ever.  We are lucky that being in the 21st century, it’s easier than ever to do.  Still, I’m thankful to those family members before me who kept those old shoeboxes full of old photographs. 

How about you?  Do you have shoeboxes full of old photos tucked away in a closet somewhere or yellowing in an old photo album?  Have any thoughts of what you may do with them? Who knows, maybe one day someone will find one of your old photos when researching their family tree!

Comments

  1. So funny that you should post this today! After suffering a near-disastrous hard drive crash and realising how important it is to constantly back up photos and files, I have resolved to print out all my scanned photos of family members dating back to the early 1900s and write a little something down for my son to read one day when he is older. I also want to make sure that my most precious family shots find their way to print (even if they languish in a shoebox!) as no-one can guarantee the longevity of data storage.

  2. As someone who works at a local history museum, I need to re-state the importance of writing details on the backs of photos. We have people bring in boxes full of old photos that are completely unidentified. It’s heart-breaking, because they have become worthless to the family… and to us.

    Definitely write the name of the subject on the back of each photo. Date, location + occasion are great too, but if time is tight at least get the names on there. If you have a lot to go through, make the task part of family gatherings http://biscotti_brain.blogspot.com/2009/11/holiday-assignment.html It might generate lots of great conversation.

  3. I have tons of old family photos from the early 1900s and a few earlier. My grandmother and her cousin loved getting friends and family together to dress up and goof-off for the camera. The had some pretty elaborate costumes at times. They’d set up in fields, the city, on rooftops. Really cool stuff. I don’t know what glue they used, but those photo are stuck pretty good and tight on the album pages. The pages are falling apart, but that glue sticks. Details they wrote on the paper are faded, but I can make out a few details. That collection is my favorite find in my genealogy research. It also tells me my interest in photography must be in my genes! lol

  4. I have a small collection of old family photos, and I’ve now scanned most of them, but still have yet to print them all. I’ve been able to identify most of them with the help of my aunt, before she passed away, but there’s one that even she wasn’t sure about: an old woman all in black and sitting in a rocking chair, in what looks like a driveway or farm road. So yes, add those identifying details to family photos. Someday, someone will want to know.

    Here’s one of my favorite heritage photos: my maternal grandmother when she was around 16, the year she got married. This is one of the few photos I have of her in which she is smiling. I remember asking her, when I was a child, why she didn’t usually smile in photos. She told me that when she was young, growing up in a farming family in the rural south, photography was expensive, and having your portrait taken was a solemn, even formal, occasion. So this photo of her with the corners of her mouth ever so slightly turned up really is a treasure.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/juju-b/4370823390/

  5. I just reorganized our family photos and put them into lovely binders this winter. It’s great to get them out of those shoe boxes and be able to flip through the pages. I’ve also posted some on our blog, which saves them in a digital format
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/71443419@N00/4133785488/in/set-72157623147051862/

    Love your Great-Aunt Sallie and like the shows on TV lately about ancestry. Very interesting. Erin’s tip is also a good one, I’ll try to add some information as she recommended. Enjoy your weekend!

  6. preserving family photos is such a wonderful legacy to leave your kids, and its a kids of spiritual journey to help you learn more about yourself, too. as a librarian/archivist, i would stress the importance of using archival quality albums and techniques to preserve your photos. i’m sure we all have photos stuck in albums, and we (gently, lovingly) curse our relatives for their handiwork. writing on the back of photos is great, but do it in pencil or an archival pen.

    also, if you have a number of photos that show local scenes of interest to others, and you don’t want to keep all of them, consider donating them to your local library/archive/historical society. we are always excited when we get gifts of local photos. that way they’re accessible to many, and they document the history of your town or city.

    ok — enough of the librarian lecture! great post — thanks!

  7. Earlier today I posted this photo of my grandmother and great aunt taken in about 1917. My great aunt hated this photo (even though it is beautiful.) whenever she saw it, she would turn it face down, sniff, and say, "Noses!"

    Isn’t it fun to know the whole story of a photo?! I agree with the comment above. Write down as much as you can. It makes the photos so much more valuable.

    http://www.ayearofhappy.com/2010/03/we-are-all-connected.html

  8. I love this post.

    As far as I know, there are no photos of my father’s side of the family beyond when he was a child…. so instead, I’ve been searching for any records available online through ancestry.com and the Ellis Island website. It’s not as personal as a photo, true, but it was enough of a connection to give me something that (I imagine) is close to the feeling of finding old photographs.

    http://hilljoyphotos.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/discovery/

  9. I recently found a site created by a distant relative–and the next thing I knew I was looking at hundreds of pictures my great-grandfather took. Incredible. I’m in the process of getting files of them to print out. (And I guess photography is in the genes.)

  10. there is nothing love more than digging through old photos! i am the family documenter, it’s become my role somehow and i always seem to find something no one has ever seen before, i love it. and especially now with life shifting and family roles shifting and changing, it’s ever so important to keep these treasures, to hold onto them so we can know the stories that live behind them.

    i actually dedicated a set on flickr to ‘oldies’ those that i have scanned in to preserve.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/camerashymomma/sets/72157622695885381/

    and digging through shoe boxes of old photos at my parents house will always be one of my fondest memories, like treasure hunting as a kid or something. and it inspired me to keep some of my photos not in an orderly fashion as they are in labeled photo albums, but also thrown nilly-willy into a box that someday someone will discover like long lost treasure. all the outtakes and real life from the photo books.

    thanks for this post today!
    xo

  15. My grandmother has kept all the family photos- in dozens of albums, some in boxes, even some as slides. It is such a precious thing- I grew up looking at those pictures and I am looking forward to sharing them with my son.

  16. what a neat photo of your great aunt. i was named after my great aunt, so i would treasure a photo like that.

    funny you should write this. i just spent several hours the other day looking at some old family photos online and was going to blog about them.

    my mom faithfully kept boxes upon boxes of family photos through the years. with five kids of her own, it would have been difficult for her to divvy them up for us or pass them on. so i am grateful that over the past several years, she has been scanning them all and putting them on flickr for any one of us to have access to.

    and it works out perfectly for posts like this one:
    http://jorjah-b.blogspot.com/2010/02/jorjah-wish.html
    when i want to wish someone like my grandmother {who very recently turned 95} a happy birthday. this is one of my favorite vintage family photos.

    i also love these of my dad, and cherish them more than ever now that he is gone:
    http://jorjah-b.blogspot.com/2009/06/jorjah-celebrate.html

    i may not have boxes and boxes of these paper photos like my mom does. but i have pages and pages of memories online that i will treasure and preserve as long as i am here.
    http://jorjah-b.blogspot.com/2009/06/jorjah-celebrate.html

    i may not have

  17. I have been fortunate enough to be blessed with the photos of my relatives. Now that I have space and a scanner, I plan to scan in the photos and write the stories behind the photos and place them into storybooks that I can share with my children and will hopefully be passed on for many generations to come.

  18. I have been incredibly lucky, my great grandmother was a history buff and traced her family tree back 12 (!) generations including one member who came to north american on the Mayflower. I am descended from two long lines of first sons … the first 6 names are "Joseph Chester Smith" and the next are "Edward Chester Smith" 😉

    My mom caught the family history bug from her and took up archiving all our family photos in a large photo book, writing down years, names and locations and sometimes anecdotes if anything was known about the photos or the people in them. They haven’t made it into digital form yet as they are on large pieces of card stock and larger than legal sized paper.

  20. For the past year I have been going through and helping my mom organize 4 large trash bags (yes folks, trash bags! I had a fit and we starte RIGHT THEN) full of photo’s. Most, yes she knew but some she didnt. Which has made me become more diligent in taking the photo’s but also in documenting the who,what,when, and where of the photo’s too….

    ummm and sometimes, some of the photo’s just ‘jump’ into my stack and make their way home with me….