Passing It On

Time to preserve those windows into your family history

Dick Clark was fond of referring to music as "the soundtrack of your life." I like to think of family photos as windows into your life.

The visual memories of our past are among the strongest memory triggers around. Thumbing through a family photo album is an evocative trip into our personal past. Each photo stirs memories of people, place and occasions from our life's journey.

But photos, especially those from our distant past, often reveal their age in unflattering ways. They crack. They fade. We assault them with glue, tape and who-knows-what chemicals from materials that once promised to preserve and protect. What to do?

You may not be able to stop the natural aging process, but it's possible to make some amends by transferring your photos to a new medium by using readily available technology. By scanning a photo (or a document) into a digital format and cleaning it up with software, you can come up with an enhanced version of your original.

Plus, it's a lot easier to share an electronic image with friends and family.

The example used with this column shows what can be done in 10 minutes by using Photoshop, a popular photo-editing software.

For more tips on preserving your family photo history, go here.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Jean&Vic.

Dealing with a windfall of photographic riches

As I noted in an earlier post, snapshots are visual portals to our past. I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately visiting some of my family’s visual portals.

In conjunction with my parents’ move from a house to an apartment, I’ve come into temporary possession of a significant portion of the family archives, including hundreds of photos and slides dating back to the early 20th century.

It’s been an absolute delight, reviving memories of long-forgotten events and people. Fortunately for me, I’ve still got my parents and brothers available to fill in some of the gaps where my own recollections come up a bit short. Eventually, I intend to distribute the scanned electronic images of the cache far and wide throughout my own family tree in hopes of learning even more.

The central people and events captured on film are valuable enough in themselves, but it’s what’s lurking in the background that makes them priceless to a family historian. That old sled supporting a long-gone ice chest. That tree you used to climb before it was felled decades ago. That gravel road before it was paved in your youth. It’s these bonus details that help put photos into a personal, historical context.

But dealing with a windfall of riches like a box of family photos can be a daunting task. How do you know what to keep? How do you organize and store it? Sally Jacobs, aka The Practical Archivist, has some tips on deciding what to keep. (Hint: When in doubt, throw it out). Guest poster Kim O’Neill Screen over at Shades of the Departed has some great ideas on how to effectively display your photos. In this digital age it’s easier than ever to share photos, as they show at Photo Sharing Blog.

Emotional connections often complicate and sometimes paralyze the sorting process. If this is true for you, consider using someone without those emotional connections, such as a professional personal historian, to make the hard choices for you.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Determined Larry Lehmer prepares for a big 1959 baseball game (Courtesy of Larry Lehmer)

Oxford Project paints vivid picture of town’s residents

The good people of Oxford, Iowa, must have thought Peter Feldstein had lost his marbles..

After all, why would a grown man set up shop in an abandoned storefront in the hamlet of fewer than 700 people and then invite townsfolk to drop in to have their picture taken?

Despite their skepticism, hundreds responded to Feldstein’s invitation, which came in the form of flyers, tacked onto utility poles and passed hand-to-hand throughout the northeast Iowa community.

That was in 1984. Twenty years later, Feldstein did it again. Teaming up with University of Iowa writing instructor and author Stephen G. Bloom, the duo produced a striking exhibit: Feldstein’s before-and-after images flanking Bloom’s brief narrative about each subject.

The exhibit, dubbed the Oxford Project, will be available this fall in book form. The book’s publisher, Welcome Books, describes the book on its web site:

“The portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, laugh lines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, bowed backs. Babies and children have sprouted into young nurses, truck drivers, teachers, rodeo riders, ardent Buddhists, racists, Democrats, strippers, and drug addicts. Time also rewards. Gawky teenagers blossom into assured men and women—the promise of the future realized.”

You can do much the same with you own family photographs by comparing one photo with another taken decades apart. Consider that person’s experiences in the intervening years and how those experiences are reflected in their appearance.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo courtesy of “The Oxford Project” published by Welcome Books. Photographs © 2008 Peter Feldstein. Text © 2008 Stephen G. Bloom. Preface © 2008 Gerald Stern. www.welcomebooks.com/theoxfordproject

Snapshots are visual portals to our past

Is it just me, or is there something magical about snapshots? Especially black and white snapshots.

Photos are the great memory joggers of our immediate past. A good photo brings back the emotions, smells, sounds and often trivial scraps of information from a long-forgotten event.

Photography has come a long way since Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre ushered in the era of modern photography in 1839. Having a photo taken was a cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive proposition for many of our ancestors. That’s why so many of those rare, treasured portraits from those older members of our family tree have such a stiff, posed look.

By the late 1950s, though, snapshots were well within the reach of youngsters like me. My first camera was a Brownie Starflash, pretty much a box camera with an attached flash. I was a snapping fool, catching Utah’s Devil’s Slide from a Union Pacific passenger train, the curious Ossified John at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, and an emergency unit racing past our house. Oh yes, and family. And friends.

Of course, today I shoot digital photos. They’re relatively easy to shoot, the results look good and processing photos is as inexpensive as its been in my lifetime. But it’s just not the same.

Have you been to a wedding where they have those cheap box cameras on the tables? My daughter did that at her wedding and, although she also had a professional photographer record the event, it’s the snapshots from those table cameras that really capture the mood and joy of the occasion.

Professional photographer Jonathan Rubin captured my thoughts perfectly when he wrote: “I own the best digital camera gear and computers money can buy, but there still is something magical about how film records an image. It’s physical, real. Light hits the emulsion and an image forms! Magic.”

If, by any chance, you come across an old camera with some exposed film inside, photo detective Maureen Taylor has some advice on how to reveal what’s lurking inside.

And, just for fun, there’s a Flickr group that’s collecting snapshots in which the photographer’s shadow makes an appearance. That’s one of them at the top of this post. I’m holding out for one that includes photographers’ thumbs.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Antique Dog Photos.

Less is plenty in family photo albums

We recently returned from a trip to Miami for the wedding of our son, Bret Lehmer, and Claudia Vilato.

It was a great trip. Lots of sightseeing, terrific food, new friends, close family, a wonderful ceremony and reception. And photos. Lots of photos.

I took several dozen myself, including this one of the newlyweds. My daughter-in-law took pictures. So did my daughter, brother-in-law and dozens of other people whose names I do not recall. That’s not counting the three professional photographers who were hired to document the occasion. I’ll bet they took thousands.

That’s the way it is in this digital age, where costly film and slow processing of the not-so-distant past have been mostly replaced by relatively inexpensive and easily manipulated pixels. It can be overwhelming.  

Truth is, less is more when it comes to saving photos. More accurately, less is enough.

Consider this: If you added just one photo a week to an album over the course of a 75-year lifetime, that’s 3,900 photos. Sure, your family loves you, but do you really think your great-grandchildren want to spend their time wading through all that?

Culling photos is a cruel, but necessary, task. Set up your own limits and stick to them. Get rid of any photos that you can’t tie to a specific memory or story. Document those stories and keep them with the pictures. If you can’t bear to part with them, pass them on to someone who may have an interest in them.

Sally Jacobs, aka The Practical Archivist, has some tips on how to cull your photo collection and how to preserve them. If you have a bunch of old photos that you’re curious about, here are some tips on how to date old photos.

Have you ever wondered why older wedding portraits show the bride standing while the groom sits? Here are some possible explanations for this phenomenon.

Larry Lehmer is a personal biographer who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or e-mail him.

Harnessing the power of King Photo

 

When it comes to memory joggers, photos are king.

There’s nothing that brings our past to life better than visual reminders. Film and video also do this, but our best connections to our more distant past often come from photographs. Long ago, having a photo taken was a big deal. Equipment was large, heavy and cumbersome. Even the subjects found picture-taking to be something of an ordeal, having to hold still for relatively long periods of time.

But, as good as photos can be in triggering old memories, they can also be confounding. This is particularly true when you don’t recognize the people in the photos. For the purposes of your personal history, though, concentrate on those photos that evoke memories of events you wish to include in your project.

Sort through your collection and pull those photos which you want to use as memory joggers. If you’re planning on committing your history to print, note which photos you may want to include in the final printed document.

The first thing to do with each photo is to identify who’s in it, what they are doing and when and where they did it. Write as much as you can about the photo and add it at the appropriate spot in your timeline. Sorting through your memories associated with a photo may spark other memories. Make note of them, too, and add them to your timeline.

You’ll probably find this sort of domino effect happening often. You’ll find yourself thinking about events and people you haven’t thought about in a very long time. Go with it. Write about it. Share it.

Tomorrow: We’ll look at some of the places of your past.

This is Lesson No. 7 of a mini-course on how to write a personal history. The course will continue throughout May, which is Personal History Month. To get future lessons delivered to you, you may subscribe to our RSS feed or get e-mail delivery to your inbox. It’s easy. Details can be found in the column to the left of this post.

Flickr photo courtesy of eskimo_jo.