In 2002, my husband and I got our first digital camera.
After my activity of the last couple of weeks, I am looking at our lives before that year as an enormous slog through boxes of faded memories.
My mother and I hatched a plan a few months ago to scan all of our family photos. She ordered a handy little scanner that sucks the photo through and saves it directly on a memory card. It’s not the highest quality, but we knew that convenience was going to be a huge factor in whether we ever got the job done.
The scanner arrived, she put it away, and that was that. Until we decided that this time, we wouldn’t put it off.
We have a long history of saying that we’re going to “do something with all those photos.” My mother depended on me for the impetus, as I am the only avid scrapbooker in the family. Or rather, was. Curiously, the further into the digital age we went, the less avid my scrapbooking became. Now I share photos online and occasionally send prints to my kids’ paternal grandmother, but otherwise, I don’t print unless I want it on the wall.
But back in the day of analog, not only did I print but I also got free doubles. I made many copies for family and friends. I kept any photo someone sent me, along with programs from concerts I’d been to, postcards I’d received, random scribbles on paper that have no meaning now.
So over the holidays, we started The Big Push to digitize our lives. At first, it seemed easy and was even pleasurable. I loved really looking at all the photos from my childhood, seeing our cats of yesteryear, remembering days at the lake. Sometimes I find that I have an actual remembrance of the day. Often, I find something in the background of a photo that sparks a memory.
The pleasure, however, only goes on so long before the pain hits: Another failed relationship. Ouch. That friend I haven’t called in years. Ouch. The crick in my neck and down my right shoulder from feeding the photos in endlessly, monotonously.
It is, however, overall a pleasurable experience. I laughed out loud when I pulled a photo of me out of the pile and wondered why it was so faded, then realized that it was my mother in the photo, not me. It’s fascinating to look at my mother’s boxes of old family photos and see the generations unfolding backwards: My mother as a teen, looking an awful lot like my older sister. My mother’s aunt as a girl, showing her Native American ancestry in a chance angle caught by the camera. My mother’s great-grandmother, a quarter Native American and probably rather unusual with her black hair and eyes amongst the blue-eyed Pennsylvania Dutch who were her people. (Her father was an orphan adopted by a Pennsylvania Dutch family.) And more and more people in swimming costumes, standing in front of my grandparents’ house, unidentified.
There are lots and lots of babies. My sister’s son wins the prize in our generation for most photos—he had the great luck of going to a family wedding at a few months old, and everyone took photos and sent them to my mom.
One of my favorite finds was a series of three prints, all of the same shot: an angry-looking baby in a hospital bassinet. On the back of one of the copies, my mother had written “Suki” in relatively recent-looking ink. But deep down in the box I found the same photo with faded ball-point ink on the back identifying the angry baby as my younger brother, with details that were clearly written at the time of birth.
“See?” I said to my mom. “I was right. There are NO baby pictures of me and you just wrote ‘Suki’ on that one to appease me!” Actually, I do appear as a baby in snapshots, but my formal hospital photo seems to be gone, probably because my baby self was red-faced and yelling, “It’s developmentally inappropriate to place a new-born baby in a cold bassinet!! Bring me to my mother and let her swaddle me this instant!”
Darn nurses probably didn’t want my mom to see that photo.
My mom’s coming over this afternoon with, she promises, more treasures. The application form my Italian great-grandparents filled out to become American citizens. More photos of babies, no doubt, and of friends, relatives, and passersby who have lost their names but left their images, yellowing and faded, for us to enjoy and try to preserve.
Omigod, you look so much like your kid I thought that was her! I too am digitizing the past and have had a similar experience. But mostly I am grateful that we can do it! I have loved forwarding the occasional “gem” to my brothers and mom for an email “groan” across the miles. I encourage everyone to make this investment. And the scanner I use is the ScanSnap. It’s pricey but you’d pay much more to have someone else do just a portion of your photos. And for albums with pics you can’t scan, you can take a digital photo so at least you have something!
We have a number of things in albums and on heavy board that we have to put on the flatbed scanner, but yes, you can also take a photo of it. I’ve also been sending out photos, and it’s amazing what different things we remember. I found a picture of a kitten that I remember loving dearly, named Precious, but that was all I remembered. I didn’t remember her grown up. My sister saw it and said, “Oh, I was so sad when Precious got lost in the snow!” So there’s the other half of the story I’m missing. It’s an interesting thing to do. I also have genealogy software (I’m using Mac Family Tree) and that’s a great way to store the old folks’ memories. I just read The Grapes of Wrath and it tied in very nicely (or not so nicely) with what I’m doing: As they are packing to leave their house in Oklahoma, trying to take only the necessities, Ma takes their box of mementos and puts it on the fire. That was painful for me to read.
Totally random but swaddling is out again.
Ack! My younger child is only 10 and already I’m hopelessly out-of-date on baby rearing knowledge. Next thing you’re going to tell me that junk food is good for them? 😉
Hi! You and I have the same issue with the whole digital-age-kills-the-scrapbook issue. Except I just started scrapbooking, and it takes me an enormous amount of impetous to keep going, because we are so digital!
I recently also sent all of my old photos in a box to a company to have them scanned for me. I’m glad I did it, as now they are sitting pretty in a digital file. But that’s where they’ve been for the last three months since I’ve had them done. Now I’ve got to organize them and share them digitally where appropriate! >.<
I love going through our old photos. We have many that a family member did that go WAY back, and they're so interesting!
Also, I wouldn't say swaddling is out right now… At least not totally. We swaddled our youngest (who just turned two last week)!
You know, my husband mentioned that we could have just sent the boxes out for scanning, but I had a feeling that if we didn’t do it ourselves, we’d just get the disk and sit on it just like we’ve been sitting on these boxes all these years. Actually going through the photos one by one and watching them get sucked through the machine was a cool part of the project. I haven’t done much with them yet, but what I’ve done so far has yielded some good results. I sent a bunch of photos of my twin aunts as babies to family members, and I contacted the artist who painted my portrait when I was 20. It’s been an interesting experience! So I highly recommend some sort of way of forcing yourself to go through them and really consider what you might do with them…
Suki – did you know that I am an avid scrapbooker? I have a whole scrapbook room, it’s crazy. I meet with other scrappers every 2nd Friday of the month in Soquel. Let me know if you’d like to join us!
Don’t tempt me to add another thing into my schedule! I’m already busier than any sane person should be, which I guess clinches the question as to my sanity… 🙂
this is a darling article. i resonate with many of the things you have said. recently i did some searching through the big box of photos and did some scanning cuz one of my friends from high school died. 🙁 only 40. anyways, i posted them on facebook for everyone.
i found the process of looking through the pictures as you describe. and the act of scanning. i also found it liberating to not have to resize or optimize them to upload to facebook. that is a nice thing about facebook – they have big servers. 🙂
maybe you’ll inspire me to scan the box…i kinda doubt it though. SUPER PROUD OF YOU THOUGH!! thanks for sharing, suki.