Who’s That in Those Faded Photos?
by Carolyn Bahm
On the far left and right are my mom and dad, Frances and Robert Ray Gaddy. In the center are my Aunt Doris and her first husband, Ray Welch, on their wedding day. My mom’s dress: Lime green. Men’s suits: Gray. Ties: Brilliant colors. Dad’s shoes: Blindingly white.
I’m finally doing something about the stacks of dog-eared family photos we’ve stored in boxes for years. Mom and I just spent two hours going through photos from the 1940s-1970s and a few earlier; the earliest was from around 1919, when her older brother was a little boy. (Mom is 80, born in 1928, the same year the world first saw Mickey Mouse.)
I wrote down Mom’s running commentary on a big Post-It note stuck to the back of each photo. She remembers who got married to who, who changed his mind about becoming a Catholic priest, and who had to drop out of nursing school when caught cheating on tests and allegedly stealing Demerol. Weddings. Days of skipping school. Graduations. Family gatherings. I’m fascinated by all the tidbits she still knows.
And it’s funny the odd bits of flotsam and jetsam we’ve kept for all these years. There are two picture of a puppy flopped down on the back steps of a house when Mom was in high school. Wasn’t her puppy; she thinks it was a neighbor’s. So we have two circa 1944 photos of a dog that wasn’t even ours. 
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My goal is to scan all our photos in on my Flickr account and to get relatives to start logging on and helping me fill in the details. I’m sure they’ll also want to download some and make copies, and I’m hoping they’ll either upload some of their own or let me borrow them so I can do that. I’ve suddenly, belatedly, realized that my mother’s generation is almost gone and I’m just a few years away from losing all this family history if I don’t write it all down, right now.
I hope you do the same for your family. That’s too rich of a tapestry to let it disintegrate into dust.
Have family photos that are on Flickr? Or ready to be uploaded to Flickr? If you let Admin know, they can be put into a rotating archive on MidLifeBloggers.com
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carolyn: as soon as my computer gets fixed, I’ll see about starting a Flickr account for MidLifeBloggers.
Jane,
I think you’ve got a fabulous idea. I’ve got some stupendous mid-70s photos of me to compare to today. Think polyester shirt in a blinding pattern with long collar points, carefully blow-dried hair, braces. I’m thinking middle-aged doesn’t look so bad after all. ;o)
Hi, Karen,
Glad you’re doing it too. I thought I’d heard all my mom’s stories until she started explaining the who’s and the where’s and the when’s of the photos. I didn’t realize several scattered photos were from the same day of playing hookey from her high school, for example.
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Good luck with your Flickr project! My pics are at username “cbahm” — you can see just a few photos there already. I hope to scan more soon, when we get through the soccer/prom/graduation seasons at our house.
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I’m about to scan some of mine as well. And I’m thinking of ways that we can create a scrapbook type page on MidLifeBloggers. How about photos of each of us as well? Then & now? Highschool & today?
Over the last few years, I’ve taken my many boxes and bags of family photos and consolidated them into protective photo boxes that will protect them from deterioration. But now I need to do what Carolyn has pointed out–figure out who everyone is especially in the photos from my mom and dad’s collection. I love the idea to scan photos into Flickr. Good project for this summer. Thanks for this suggestion, Carolyn.
Karen