Recently a friend pulled photos of her grandchildren from her purse to share. Hadn’t seen that in awhile. My photos are on my I-phone AND I have video. Video is everywhere. I’m not sure what that means in terms of family history but it seems significant. Long ago, only wealthy families could afford pictures of themselves. You had to hire a painter, dress-up, do a long sitting. The finished painting, one-of-a-kind, hung in the manor...

Read More

I did the hard way. Set up a photo stand and copied the old family photos via film using my old Nikon 100. THEN I scanned them, one by one, one by one. If you’ve ever tried to tackle the task of copying old family photos, you know why most don’t. It’s too hard, too iffy, and too time consuming. You could grow old yourself in the process. So where are your old photos? Does this look familiar? Enter ShoeBox–the same I-Phone...

Read More

The old adage says “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Not always true, but there are photos that seem to be a story. We look, smile, and wish we knew more about what’s going on. This family at a museum in Toronto, for example. Don’t you almost wish you could overhear what they’re talking about? Aren’t you tempted to make up a story? Little confession: that’s my son and his daughters. I didn’t...

Read More

I had a great aunt whose idea of entertainment was to bring out the family photographs and carefully repeat the names, “This is cousin So-and-So.” A man’s wife was always “Mrs. So-and-So,” never a first name, who was called something else before she was married and something else after she re-married. Of course, Mrs. So-and-So was related to someone else I was supposed to know . . .. I was worse than bored. I grumped and slumped until...

Read More

Writing for the Denver Post, a friend, Claire Walter, gathered some wonderful stories about keepsakes and how they keep us healthy. Check out the article; there are medical studies that indicate that keepsakes aren’t just kitsch. Because they mean something (have a story attached), they help us stay balanced, in-touch-with-our-past, and healthy. As an example, Walter lets Hollis Brooks tell the story of her lamp: “There is a pretty...

Read More

  Browsing through an antique store, I came across an old photo album filled with snapshots of a family who once lived near a beach. California? Florida? The pictures focused on two girls, maybe seven, who might have been sisters. Besides seeing the two of them over and over again, I saw a house with a palm tree, a Chevrolet station wagon, and a dog that looked at the girls, never at the camera. A seemingly happy family from the 1950s was...

Read More