Who Are Those People? And What Are They Doing in Your Closet?

A sight that immediately saddens me is finding stacks of family photos for sale in antique stores; discarded because no one had a clue as to who the people were in the photos. So let's get those photos out of your closet, out from under the bed, or out of your digital shoebox...and label them!

I’ve been a Creative Memories consultant for 20 years but long before that I was a scrapbooker. My first camera was a Christmas present from my uncle when I was eleven. My Brownie Instamatic and I took photos of Christmas Day, family, schoolmates and vacations and put them all in a scrapbook. A cheap, black scrapbook that years later I discovered was one of the worst environments in which to put my photos. The acid on the pages eventually caused the pictures to fade. Even worse, I attached the photos to the pages with small, rolled-up pieces of cellophane tape. Yikes! That damage was obvious a few years later when brown spots started appearing on the fronts of the photos where the tape was stuck on the back. All my documentation was on the scrapbook page so when the photos were removed to prevent further damage, there were no names or dates on the photos.

My grandmother had a different method of identifying people in her photos for posterity. She certainly had the right idea, but she wrote on the front of the photos with cheap pens. Within a couple of decades the ink had bled and names became hard to read.  Anything written on the back of the photo bled through to the front, effectively destroying the image.

We both loved our photos and tried to save them to enjoy in the future, but we didn’t realize what we were doing would damage the very things we were trying to save. Luckily, the photo album/scrapbooking/memory-saving industry has found ways to alleviate the problems my grandmother and I had with our photos.

The first, and most important, thing to do with photos after printing is to label them. Label them completely.  Use a photo-safe, soft leaded pencil and write on the backs of photos for documentation. This type of pencil won’t cause indentations to the front of the photo that a sharp, hard instrument will and it will not bleed to the front of the photo.

Doing this could save your photos from the antique malls of the future. And get those strangers out of your closet so you can enjoy your family photos for years to come.

Grandma's Quilt Block

Discovering Kyle Family Heritage

A local church was celebrating its150th anniversary in the summer of 2010. I stopped on my way home to visit with friends, see the Pony Express re-enactor, and look at the quilts on display. As I rounded the corner to see the quilt display, I stopped in my tracks. There directly in my line of sight was a quilt block with my grandmother's name embroidered on it.

What was the cause of my amazement? Grandma died a year before I was born and yet here was something she had made decades ago. Her hands had not held me but they had held and worked this quilt square in front of me. I stood staring and contemplated how much more enriched my life might have been with her in it. I slowly reached out and gently touched that physical link to Grandma.

The feeling of wonderment continued as I left the church and stopped to talk with friends. I mentioned how gobsmacked I was to find my grandmother's signature on a quilt. "I remember her," one woman told me when I finished my story. "She gave me piano lessons."

My grandmother graduated from the Maryville Music Conservatory in 1916. When she came home, she taught local students. My grandfather once told me she would have had her granddaughters playing 'Yakka Hula Hickadoola' if she had lived. (This was evidently one of his favorite songs.)

"She gave lessons around 1944-45 at the high school; I think because her sister was teaching there. She charged $1 for an hour or maybe 30 minutes," she continued.  "But I didn't like playing at recitals. So Mrs. Kyle would cut my recital piece until it was just the part that I knew." We laughed and I thought my grandmother must have been an understanding teacher to cut a little girl's recital piece to be just what she could play.

Serendipity
Driving home that afternoon I continued to marvel at how a scrap of fabric and a chance stop on a summer day made a grandmother I never knew come alive.

What to expect here

Lots of topics    
     A mixture, blend, and occasional fusion of topics ranging from local history including western Missouri Civil War, genealogy tips, family genealogy (sometimes with pictures), computer software finds, preserving family photos and memories, and those fun people met along the way.  All from my perspective, of course.

     There's so much in this world that, when found, has to be shared.  This is my sharing place. My wish is that this will be a place you find something to share with others along your way.