Before we moved into our current home in 2019, I did a lot of cleaning and sorting, which revealed many treasures and trash. But there were many boxes I moved from one house to the next without any review. Some of those were boxes of things from my parents, and I thought I had reviewed them adequately in 2015 when I emptied their last home.
But I decided recently that it was time to go through all my old photographs, with a view toward digitizing what I want to preserve and disposing of as many physical copies as possible. I started with a banker’s box labeled “Claudson Photos,” which I thought contained photographs from my parents’ house. I thought this would be an easy place to begin my review.
A lot of the pictures in the box were in fact from my parents’ house. But a lot of these were snapshots my husband and I had sent them, so they were of my kids and my husband and me.
This latter category of pictures included a full set of the photographs we had taken on our hike around Mont Blanc with our kids in 1998. I must have seen these snapshots after we had them printed a quarter-century ago, but I didn’t remember many of them. Perhaps we have another set of these pictures in the boxes of our own photos that I have yet to go through, but I won’t know until I find them. In the meantime, I reminisced about the trip. As I went through those photos, I threw out images of scenery and kept the pictures of people. Many of the pictures I kept are not great photos, but they remind me of how each of the four of us approached the hike.
Other treasures I found included pictures of my mother and her family when she was a pre-teen—at the beach, at a mountain lake, and in the home where she grew up. She poses with her brother and parents in some and with cousins in others. I don’t remember ever seeing these pictures before. They’re tiny snapshots, but I hope I can preserve them well enough to make them worth keeping. I kept all the pictures in which I recognized the people, though I threw out other images from that era if I didn’t recognize anyone.
Apart from photographs, this box also contained my mother’s detailed records of her plans for my wedding in 1977. My parents kept all the receipts for flowers, dresses, tuxedoes, hotel reception, etc., for my wedding. The total cost of the event was under $3,000—for that, we dressed everyone in the wedding party and fed about 100 guests on cake and hors d’oeuvres. My wedding dress cost $310. It was a lovely dress from I. Magnin’s, a luxury department store in San Francisco. I think it was on sale, but still . . . only $310! The cake was $101.75, and the flowers were $241.20.
This box also contained pictures of my son’s Eagle Scout ceremony, of my daughter playing 8th-grade volleyball and basketball, and of other events which I remember but which I didn’t think were preserved on film.
All from one banker’s box.
I threw out lots of duplicate images, and images that were clearly too dark or fuzzy to be worth reproducing. But there really wasn’t much trash in the box. Plus, I had an afternoon of memories resurrected of speculation on events before my time. Even though there wasn’t much trash, I reduced the volume from a full box to about a third of a box.
I have about six more similar banker’s boxes of photographs to go through. And then I’ll move onto the boxes of documents (I hope those go more quickly). I’ll continue to report on what I find.
Have you digitized your photographs?
I started doing the same thing. Scanning what I want to keep handy. Just that I cannot throw away photos, as long as they are visible. If I do not recognize the old ones (70+ years), then I put them away in a shoe box. If I recognize the relatives, I scan the photo and I give the original to my cousins/ their children/ grandchildren.
Actually, I have 3 shoe boxes = albums now. There are some doubles too.
My father took lots and lots of family photos, producing mostly slides, but many prints also. One of my sisters ended up with them from my mother. She asked if any of us 5 siblings wanted them and with no other motivation but not wanting them to disappear, I took them.
Did I say a lot? I’m pretty sure there were >1000 but I didn’t count. I used a service to digitize them which included enhancing those which had faded or degraded over the decades. Now they are “tucked away” in the cloud.
I find one once in a while and share it in our ongoing sibs chat. Its fun to remember the location, situation, and sometimes which one of us “that kid in the middle” is. Did I really wear a swim cap?
My father and grandfather took lots of pictures on slides also. My dad had some of them digitized before he died. My sister ended up with the actual slides.
I’m now dealing with printed snapshots from three generations. Like you, I hope to find a service that can enhance some of them that have faded. Polaroids were fun at the time, but the colors have not remained true.