Photo book

Yesterday’s post mentioned I purchased a small photo album to save holiday cards for our granddaughter.

These little photo cards are a snapshot of our immediate family’s year. It is a family tradition. These cards are distributed to our friends and family, long time friends of the kids, and some of DIL’s family.

I am adding to this tradition by making a photo book for granddaughter each year. The photo book will be an expanded version of the holiday cards. I am including information and photos about all seven of us. It will be a family photo book (not a baby book). 

I am gifting this family photo book at what might seem like an unusual time, Valentines Day.

February 14 deadline (each year) gives me plenty of time to construct and order the book reflecting January 1 - December 31 of the previous year. 

I can get the whole previous year in, including Christmas and New Years, by using Valentines Day as my gift date. 

The title of each book is the year. That helps simplify. The books will be very uniform.

The family photo book gives me a family tradition gift to send each year, on Valentine’s Day. 

This meaningful gift will help avoid gift clutter. It will probably be less expensive to send a custom photo book than buy nonsense and pay shipping. I will have it shipped directly. 

Having the deadline be tied to a holiday/gift should ensure it gets done once a year. A deadline is important. My deadline will be granddaughter’s family tradition.

Granddaughter was born late spring 2024. So yes, the 2024 book will be a partial year, for granddaughter’s pictures, but it will still be a very full book. There are activities for the other six of us, from the whole year. We had two baby showers prior to her birth. There are a lot of baby pictures. We all visited in 2024. There are six pets in the family. 

Photo frames

This would make a great gift idea. 

I ordered this first 10” digital photo frame directly from Amazon in March 2022, $180.83. We had problems with it. It was a return with someone else’s photos loaded on it. It appeared as if a family bought it for a party, loaded/used it, and then returned it. 

Amazon refunded the full amount after we complained about the fact it was a second hand frame. Skylight helped us return it to factory settings/clean.

I kept this 10” frame. It has been in the living room for the last two years. The kids send photos directly to it.

It recently moved to the kitchen. The 10” size is perfect on a kitchen counter. We tend to watch the frame while we wait for the microwave.

There is a power strip with a short cord behind the frame. This is my charging station.

I recently ordered a 15” (directly from Skylight) for the living room. I really love the larger size in the living room. 

I did not wait for a sale. I ordered June 2024. I ordered directly from Skylight (not Amazon) so I was assured it would be a new one. 

A very good gift idea from this just past Christmas

Middle got an electronic photo frame for me a couple years ago. Mine came with a funny little story, it was loaded with photos from a bar mitzvah and we had a heck of a time removing them. 

The kids and I email photos to my frame. I really enjoy it. 

My brother and I buy one expensive gift a year for my mother. This covers Christmas, her birthday and Mother’s Day. She is turning 82 and does not need a lot. It has just worked out that I have been able to think of one big thing each year. 

The first year we contributed a big gift certificate to her landscaping redo. The second year was a new garage door opener with key pad and safety shut off sensor. Last year was a new (big) TV. This year was a 15” photo frame. 

I am envious of the 15” frame. It is pretty great.

Shutterfly policy change

 I received an email from Shutterfly, last week, warning me of an important policy change. 

This is very major for me. Shutterfly is one of my backup photo storage places. 

Instead of getting irritated, I did my photo holiday card from start to finish on that Friday. And my plan is to order from Shutterfly every year, so I have an automatic order every 12 months. 

I ordered 120 custom 5”x7” cards with envelopes with free shipping. They should arrive today.

I think, this is the least I have spent for the most amount of cards. 

I did not special order rounded corners. I did not special order photo/print on the back. I did not special order off white stock/envelopes.

Having a total of four photos and very limited text on the front was helpful. I had to edit my text very tightly to convey our year in about 105 total words, including greeting and signature. 

I embraced the editing challenge and am very pleased with the card order. 

Identifying photos during a scanning visit

My mom, husband and I went to my mom’s first cousin’s house to scan photos, a couple Saturday’s ago. 

This is our second time going to a relatives for a mass scan, we went to Iowa in the summer of 2019, very good timing. Middle went with us to my husband’s cousin’s house, we stayed the weekend. Eight months later, we were in a long lockdown. 

On that first trip, my husband labeled each photo, on his lap top, as he scanned, which was time consuming. 

This trip, I used post it notes and the camera on my phone, which worked better. 

What mattered, what I needed to document, was what I did not know by sight.

I knew I was coming home to move the photos from my husband’s laptop, which we had taken in order to use our portable flatbed Epson scanner, to our PC. I also knew I was immediately going through all the photos, labeling them on the PC. 

So I only needed to make notes on what I did not know, mostly years and locations. If I knew the people, I did not need a note. 

This worked very well. I wrote most of the notes myself as I loaded the scanner. Sometimes my mom’s cousin wrote longer things out for me. Most of the photos were not labeled. I had my mom and her two cousins to help look/think/calculate. I am very good with identifying people in photos. 

My husband ran the laptop/scanner. 

(My mom mostly enjoyed looking at photos and talking with her cousins, who she had not seen in person in decades, but chats with them online on occasion.)

Update on the slide situation

All the way back in January, I mentioned slides absolutely do not last.

https://baby-steps-v.blogspot.com/2022/01/slides-public-service-announcement.html?m=1

We do not have a lot of slides, but we do have some that we want to save. Preserving slides means converting them to digital, quickly.

Our local library has lots of electronic and craft/skill equipment available for use. So 3-D Printers, scanners, sewing machines, soldering equipment, etc. 

The library slide scanner is an Epson, but more complex than the Epson we have at home. This one has a special light, down the center. (See my arrow).

The holder positions the slides exactly under the extra light.

It scans four slides at a time.

It was about the same speed as our regular flatbed Epson scanner at home. The scanning app/buttons were exactly the same. 

The conversion quality is good. The photo with the boys and the car on the computer screen was a slide. Now it is a digital photo. (Yes, that photo is hysterical. It was my husband doing some type of slide photo assignment for a college photography class in the early 1980’s. Normally he did not/does not take slides. Those were college buddies.)

So we will be able to convert all our keeper slides to digital photos, easily and for (nearly) free. The only expense was we replaced our memory stick. Memory sticks also do not last.

We scan the slides on the library system. We save them on a memory stick plugged into the library computer. We bring the memory stick home, plug it into our computer, save the digital photos.

This scanner will also scan negatives. We have not yet tried that, we think all our negatives have been printed. Plus, there  are still photo stores that will print negatives. But those brick and mortar/local photo stores are dwindling very quickly. In my area, we are down to Walgreens photo lab (in the store) and some things have to be mailed for processing. And we have one local specialty photo store left. 

The computer room clean out

Nearly two years (2020-2021) of my husband working at home, and my mother bringing all her photos to my house (2019), and the stacked boxes from my husband’s old office clean out (2017) cumulated in a very big mess. 

If you look at that picture and wonder how the counter can handle the weight, it could not. One of the support brackets broke in half. 

A handyman installed a temporary support post. 

I ordered a four drawer cabinet for storage and to support the counter. I ordered the cabinets (Lowe’s) at the end of January, they arrived mid April. 

Those cabinets are my limit now. 7 years of tax binders/my genealogy binders not included, all the papers/files in the house must now fit in these four drawers. 

This is where we are today, very pleasant workspace, I am in there daily now -

The steps in this process included:

- shipping about 36 packages of photos to other people

- getting rid of 2 old file cabinets on wheels

- installing a 4 drawer storage unit for counter support 

- shredding an enormous volume of old papers 

- limiting papers to what fits in the 4 new file drawers

- repairing the broken support

- cleaning out every cupboard and cubby

- removing all the extraneous stuff from the floor 

- removing as much as possible from the counter

- rearranging the printer/PC work stations 

A public service announcement about Polaroid photos

In short, Polaroid photos do not last. In the days before digital, they were “instant” in a very fun way. If you have polaroids you care about, get them scanned quickly.

This print is nearly gone. But I think you will be able to see what the scanner can still pull from my examples (below). 

This first one is the scanned version, the scanner was able to pull up some of the photo. Notice the chimney, trees in the background and details of the snow. They are somewhat visible in this scanned version. If you are trying to place it, this is a big snow on my grandparents’ farm probably in the very late 1960's or early 1970's. 

This second one is the scanned version, lightened.

This last version is what the photo actually looks like. This one was taken with my phone and is a more accurate view of what the photo looks like to the human eye. Notice the trees are not really visible. One has to squint to see the chimney. It looks like night or under deep water. 

A public service announcement about standard size envelopes

First, let me announce, I am now up to 28 photo packages mailed. Each one is very exciting.

I have been using the kiosk at the post office, after hours, for almost all my mailing needs for the last couple years. I have mailed a lot of things since March 2020.  

Several Saturdays ago, I had two packages to mail that needed checked out by a clerk. I had a box going to Sweden which required a customs form. I had a box going book rate to a library (yearbook donation post coming soon). I could not do either of those at the kiosk. 

That day, I had three envelopes going also. These 3 were envelopes I normally would do at the kiosk, but since I was going IN anyway, I took them all to the counter. One was half size manilla filled with photos, one was a greeting card size full of photos, and one was an empty square notecard in a square envelope. 

I put a stamp on the square one, at home, because it was not heavy. 

When I got to the counter at the post office I commented one already had the postage and the rest needed weighed/calculated. 

The post office clerk said the square one needed more postage because it was square. Evidently, square, regardless of the size, must be hand sorted, they get caught/destroyed in the machine/reader/sorter.

So I paid for 30 cents more postage on the square one. He processed the rest of my things. 

I went home and collected all my square envelopes and gave them to a friend who uses them for scrapbooking. 

Very interestingly, later that same day I was at a bookstore, having them buy back old computer games, and I browsed in the close-out notecard section while I waited. A shocking number of the close out notecards were undersized and/or square. (I found cute notecards, 3.5”x5”, and got them for youngest with my store credit. I try to use store credit immediately.)

I am sure I have used square envelopes in the past, with no extra postage, and now I wonder if they ever made it to their destinations. 

The mystery 8th grade class photo from 1933.

The first story was the 152 mystery photos from my great grandma’s album that went to the library. The second story was Delbert. This class picture is (I think) my last mystery photo/the third story. It is so nice when things work out in threes. 

Unfortunately, the photo was clearly cut to fit some crazy shaped frame long ago. Many of the names are no longer readable on the back. I can sort of make out the ones on the front enough to be fairly certain no relatives are listed. I also do not recognize faces. Did you notice “8th grade” and “1933” handwritten on the bottom?

First, I sent this electronic image to the genealogy department in my birth town library. The lady there can work magic. I heard back pretty quickly that she had traced several of the names to Dolton, Illinois. They suggested I write to the genealogy society there, I did. 

Part of that makes sense. My maternal grandmother lived in Dolton as a child. 1933 is about right for her to be in 8th grade. Two problems: she does not appear to be in this picture. I think she only completed the 6th grade. 

I heard back from Dolton genealogy society. This is what they said -

“This school still exists. It is in the elementary school district where I attended as a child. The school is located at 14151 Lincoln Avenue, Dolton, IL. It is in District #148 which covers parts of Riverdale and Dolton. The district office is located at 114 W. 144th Street, Riverdale, IL 60827. phone 708-841-2290. I looked for some of the names that were listed on the photo. Most of these students were born in 1920 in Dolton. I tried to locate a graduation list on Newspapers.com but could not find one. The Pointer was the local newspaper in Riverdale and Dolton at that time. I know that the Dolton Public Library has microfilm of the Pointer newspaper. I would check with them to see if they can locate a graduation list. Please send a donation to our Society for the time spent researching this question.”

I first mailed them a check for $5. I rarely have to pay, on this project I ended up paying twice. 

She did not state the name of the school, I looked it up from the address. It is Lincoln Elementary. The “Lincoln” becomes ironic later in the story. 

Then I called the Dolton library and the reference librarian told me their microfilm machine broke and they pitched all their microfilm. (I wrote back to the Dolton genealogy society and told them this shocking news). 

Then I called the School District office and was told by the assistant that their records do not go back that far. I left a message for one of the head people, just incase. 

Then stumped, I called my genealogy department at my local library. He gave me the number for the Illinois State library. I did not know there were state libraries. The Illinois State library could not help me, but gave me the number for the Abe Lincoln Presidential Library. 

And the reference librarian at the presidential library confirmed they have newspaper archives from the Pointer newspaper in Dolton/Riverdale from 1933.

I had to register (online) with the Abe Lincoln library. There is a $5 fee for each article, and they are sent by email as a PDF. 

I sent the reference librarian (doing the actual search) a copy of the front and bank of the photo as well as the information from my birth town library and the genealogy society in Dolton. 

I heard this past week that she had success. I mailed my $5 check, online payment is usually not available for these searches. So I should be getting my PDF, maybe this coming week. 

I have a plan. If the list confirms no one in my family is in this photo, I will do two things. I will first see if my local library genealogy department wants to scan/post the photo and class list. And then I will see if the Abe Lincoln Presidental library wants the actual photo. 

Delbert

I do not pitch things lightly. And that definitely includes photos. 

As I have shipped and shipped, 23 packages, the piles have definitely dwindled. I am left with my direct line/keeper people which now feels very manageable.

But I was also left with mystery/unknown photos. I have been working on those, steadily. 

Dropping off 152 unknowns at the library definitely helped reduce my mystery pile. That left just a few. 

It is just crazy what I have found in the unknown photo stash. Here is a good example -

(There were more photos). 

I have absolutely no idea how we have these pictures. The city and the face and the name mean nothing to me, my mother, my mother’s sister, my mother’s sister-in-law and brother. 

I am pretty sure I found the right guy and posted them on Find a Grave, so they are saved. 

The Genealogy Dept in my birth town, who knows my extended family, could not place him (as related to my family) either. But they found his grandson’s mailing address for me. 

I sent the package of photos with this note - 

January 25, 2022

A couple years ago, my mom and I started sorting extended family photos including those of my grandparents and great grandparents. (My mom just turned 81, and lives a couple blocks from me. I am turning 61 in March.) The photo clean out has been a very worthwhile project, and much easier to do while my mom is still alive/well/able to help identify/sort. 

We ran across the enclosed packet of photos. We suspect they were in with my great grandmother’s things. Her name was ________________ and she lived at Koontz Lake in Walkerton, Indiana. We are only guessing this because Pierceton and Koontz Lake are sort of near to each other. Otherwise, it is an utter mystery to us, how these photos ended up at my house. 

The genealogy department at the _______ County library was able to trace Delbert and if they are correct, you are his grandson. If this is not correct, please contact me. If it is correct – surprise, here are photos of your grandfather from long ago. 

Either way, my mother and I are very curious to hear from you. Maybe you have an older relative that might shed some light on these mystery photos.

The unknown photos from my great grandmother’s album

As I mentioned, after I shipped hundreds of photos, I was able to focus on what I had left. Besides my direct line keepers, I had a lot of unknowns. I do not pitch photos easily, but I also have a use it or lose it philosophy, finding a solution for a pile of unidentifiable photos required thought. 

Last month, with much relief, I dropped a large envelope with 152 photos off at the local genealogy department. Yes, that picture (below) is 152 photos, doesn’t look like that much, does it? 

In Indiana, many county libraries have very good (staffed) genealogy departments. I use several of them regularly. The one in my town happens to be one of the best in the country.  

I had called earlier and explained that I had unlabeled photos from my great grandmother’s album that were approximately WWI era. They discussed it within the department and then called to say that yes, they wanted them, if I was willing to write an accompanying piece about my great grandmother. 

I wrote, youngest helped me edit. I included information about my great grandma’s parents and grandparents and two husband’s. I talked about the restaurant that her mother and step-father ran in the early 1900’s near the railroad station, where they worked and met many people. I talked about who might be in the photos, mentioning family lines and WWI soldiers. 

The library is going to scan the photos and include my piece when they post the collection online. I am not sure if it will be edited or included as I wrote it. 

The relief, to have something meaningful to do with those photos, was huge. I estimate that most were taken before 1922. So yes, 100 year old photos. 

I could not bring myself to pitch them. But I had to think very hard what to do with them. 

Slides - a public service announcement

I am sorting family photos. We have very few slides. 

This is a public service announcement, because we did not know, the slides were in boxes. 

That is my mom in the white coat, who is now 81, so these slides are about 65 years old.

We looked it up, this happens to slides with age. They do not last. 

If your family has slides, get the important ones printed. 

We have very few that we care about. My husband is taking the keepers to the downtown library. They have a scanner that we can use for free to scan slides to digital. Have to take your own memory stick.

Also photo places will convert/print them. 

We do not have a lot. The ones on the light box are from my mom’s family. There are only a couple keepers. The ones in the bin are from my husband’s side. We do not know how many keepers, we suspect just a few. 

The extended family photo project

My mother sorted/divided/distributed photos from her second husband’s side of the family a couple years ago. So all those family photos are now in the hands of his children and grandchildren. It was a huge relief to her, and to me, very smart/proactive, and as a 2nd wife, a kind thing to do. 

Then, my mom sorted out the rest of her photos and brought the lot, from our side of the family, over to my house. Hundreds and hundreds of photos. 

I absolutely wanted the photos and it was very good to do this while she was still alive. Before she gave them to me, she wrote on the back of almost all of them. And she sorted as best she could, but they were still a bit of a jumble, many envelopes, folders, boxes. 

I totally changed my mind on what to do with these photos.

My intention, at the time she gave me the piles, was to put all those extended family photos in my red genealogy binders. Thankfully I started on a few stacks, but never really got to it. 

Recently, I rethought the whole concept.  

I realized none of my kids will want any of these extended family photos. And they do not know most of these people by sight, they would not be able to sort these photos. And it would be a terrible dilemma for them. When a house gets cleaned out, probably it all just gets pitched or stored in boxes forever. (Probably they will not want my red genealogy binders either.)

So, with my husband helping me, we went through our own photo albums, my mother’s stacks (which included photos from my grandmother and great grandmother), and the red genealogy binders.  We started dividing photos, very very aggressively. Our plan - to distribute extended family photos to the extended family. 

Which extended family?

I have five maternal first cousins, all their parents/my aunts and uncles are still alive and now in their mid to late 70’s. I am not sending pictures to the older folks, who hopefully have started cleaning out their own houses. Instead I am sending directly to their kids, my first cousins. And I am sending to my niece and nephew, my brother’s children, and my brother. 

I knew I had all current addresses, from my last two years of Christmas card mailings. I am not asking anyone in advance if they wanted photos. I am not asking anyone any questions (except my mother). And I think this is key. If they want to pitch, rehome, redivide, whatever, that is on them. But those stacks of photos are all going to be out of my house and are already gone from my mother’s house.

How did we start sorting?

If you are wondering about the practicalities, we cleaned off the kitchen table, made signs to identify the piles and just dug in to the sorting on a recent Saturday.

We started with our house set of photo albums. My husband put them on the kitchen table and we went thru every picture pulling ones of just the extended family. If we were also in the pictures, sometimes we saved them, often they went in the piles.

Then we went thru my mom’s piles. This was the hard part, there were a lot. I had to do the very old ones, my husband was able to focus on my brother/niece/nephew who he could easily recognize.  

We pulled for my cousins, brother, niece, nephew. 

We saved photos of me, my mother, my grandparents, my great grandparents and great-great grandparents. I saved some of the pictures of us with other family members, I shared others. My mother thought she had destroyed all her first wedding pictures. She had not, I found an envelope full and was glad to see them. Many of the pictures I kept came from my mother’s, grandmother’s and great grandmother’s photo albums which we had disassembled several years ago. The albums were not photo safe and were crumbling. My mother wrote on the back of all the ones we pulled from albums.

Then we went thru the red genealogy binders and pulled the pertinent pictures I had already filed. 

By the end of that Saturday, we were sorted and the photos were safe in plastic bags. And we figured out and assembled boxes for shipping. 

That was a 8+ hour project, but it was easier to do the sorting all in one go. 

This photo (below) amuses me because it looks so simple. There are hundreds of photos in those bags. But, the bags all look so small in this picture. There were too many photos to use padded envelopes. We needed boxes, which I had. 

It was important to pause, a long pause in fact, I am still paused.

And then I purposely paused. The kitchen table stayed exactly like the above photo. The boxes are all addressed with the bags of photos in them,  but the boxes are not yet sealed.

By myself, taking my time, I am going back thru each plastic bag, carefully, to see if we made any mistakes or if I changed my mind about any photos. I am taking photos with my phone of a few pictures.

I called my mom and she looked thru her house several more times to be sure she had gotten everything. 

I am still looking carefully at my house to be sure we got everything. I have a large metal cabinet upstairs, which I think is full of pictures from my husband’s side, but we are going thru it now. 

And I am writing notes to include with each box, when they are eventually shipped. 

What were all these pictures? 

My cousins, niece/nephew, brother will all receive pictures of themselves solo, or with/of their family (parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, grandparents). 

Many of these pictures had come at holidays over the decades, photo Christmas cards, professional individual or family portraits, candids, baby pictures and school photos for example. There were also a lot of photos I had taken, candids from family gatherings, decades ago. I am almost 61. I often had a camera in hand as a child/teenager/young adult. And there were photos from my mom’s very old albums, my mom is 81.

A huge advantage, in dividing for my niece and nephew, was that because I had my mom’s stash and my stash, there were a lot of duplicates, so my niece and nephew each got important/identical photos in their piles. 

The rest of the sibling sets to my cousins, I just divided as evenly as I could. There are a lot of very old pictures of their parents/my aunt and uncle, in those sets that I am sure my cousins have never seen. 

Hopefully these boxes will be happily received. 

We are shipping hundreds of photos to people who, hopefully, will be very surprised and happy to receive them. Most importantly - hundreds of photos are headed out of my house and my kids will not have to deal with them. 

Find a Grave

This is the online system where genealogy/family graves are linked and there are pictures of gravestone inscriptions (and sometimes) family photos and obituaries added.

Very clever people are answering photo requests. This is happening in a wide spread way. More than one person is clearly taking photos, because I have had many requests filled in multiple counties in the last week.

So they are going to cemeteries, hunting graves, taking pictures of the stones and loading them in the system. Very clear social distancing. I am sure most cemeteries are deserted.

These particular cemeteries are mostly out in the middle of absolutely nothing and nowhere. Old country sites. So I know there is major social distancing.

Great solo activity. It takes a long time to find graves. And they are getting fresh air and sunshine and a real sense of accomplishment, I am sure.

Genealogy blogs

I keep my genealogy documents in red three ring binders. I have a lot of binders. And most of the documentation is on closer family members - My parents and grandparents, the greats, aunts and uncles, the greats, etc. I also have  a lot of things on my computer. . I save documents, pictures, invitations, news clippings, obituaries, etc.

My mom has a friend whose genealogy research is all hand written. Binders and notebooks full.  (She is in her 80’s).

So where my binder has a copy of a death certificate, hers has handwritten notes on what the death certificate said. To be honest, I shake my head at that methodology.

I question what is actually going to happen to all that handwritten data. But I also wonder about mine.

My kids, my brother, my niece and nephew live in a very digital world. I would assume it will continue to get more digital. And decluttering and downsizing  will continue as the trend.

I am not sure if I have mentioned, I am scanning family archives of pictures, steadily, to both preserve and share them.

It started with pictures of my brother, which I scanned and texted to him and  his kids.

Then we made a trip out of state to my husband’s cousin. And we scanned pictures for two full days. We bought a flatbed scanner that hooked up to my husband’s laptop. He scanned and labeled every picture. We saved to both the lap top and drop box. We are the only ones to have copies of all those pictures.

And I have been scanning documents.

Those pictures and all my documents and the facts and stores about each person, require a home. Family trees are needed to explain. Everything needs to be organized and readable/understandable.

I needed a digital structure. I wanted one that could be private, was free, and was easy for me to use. I wanted something that could be opened on any phone or computer with no special program needed. I wanted something that could be printed into a book if wanted/needed.

So as I write, I am in the process of putting all my information and documents and pictures in a blog format for various branches of the family.  I put each branch on its own separate blog, for ease of volume and use. But I can link between the blogs, which is quite handy. I am using lots of tags and links as I go.

I am using blogger, because I am use to it.

I will give access to extended family who are interested.

So I am not sharing the genealogy blogs  here, but I wanted to mention the idea.

And if you happen to know of any genealogy blogs like this that are open, I would be interested in seeing them.

putting old family photos in my red genealogy binders

Yesterday my mom helped me file pictures.

It rained all day, we were not able to move the grape hyacinths as we had planned.

I had a wide variety of photo pages, all archival safe. So pages made to hold 3”x5” vertical and horizontal, 4”x6”, 5”x7”, and 8”x10”. These were left from photo albums. And I was very happy to use them. Although now I need to order more 5”x7” pages.

We sorted pictures, only the ones I had in the computer room, put them in pages and then inserted pages into the corrected tabbed section of the right genealogy binder. So all the pictures of my grandma, are in her section with her papers.

My mother and one of my aunts had labeled almost all the pictures. My mom  and my aunt are both approaching 80.

All of this is because I am the youngest/last one. I am the last one who will know who any of these people are and how they fit together.

We took care of all the pictures I had downstairs. Upstairs is a metal cabinet full of pictures. Going to work my way thru that cabinet too. And my husband is going to have to help because a lot of that metal cabinet is his family’s pictures; all of his mother’s pictures came here when the boys cleaned out her houses. He went thru and scanned and emailed many identifiable pictures to his brothers, pictures of their immediate family. But he has done nothing long term, archival. Because every picture from his family is not labeled, he has procrastinated. That will leave our kids with a mess. And they do not know who many of those people are. My husband is the last one also. (We have the only kids.)

One of the genealogists at the library has two big bins of pictures where she does not know who anyone is. She has older relatives still alive, she scans pictures and puts them on an app where she wants all her extended family to log on and help label pictures. So far no one is participating. I think they are spread across the country so in person labeling is difficult. She needs to get on a plane and go to her oldest relatives, with the pictures.




I have very few pictures of myself as a child.

I have a few of my brother too. Last night I scanned and texted his pictures to my brother, my niece, my nephew. With the exception of his senior picture, my brother had never seen any of them.

And they might all be pictures I took, as a child. They look like a child’s eye. (We are six years apart).  Very candid pictures, just point and shoot. There were pictures of his 1st, 2nd, 3rd birthdays a couple early Christmases, that he did not know existed.

I have a few more that I will scans and send.

I did not hear from my niece but my nephew and his girlfriend thought they were hysterical. And I think scanned photos are more valuable to them than printed photos. (I have an office quality scanner). And it was free. And now his pictures are in a file on my computer.




I have been scanning and loading pictures on Find a Grave also. Relatives and also straggler photos that do not really have a place.

So when I have a random picture, that I do not really care about, friends of my grandparents for example, I scan it and load it to their (person in photo) grave. It gives a purpose to those stragglers.

My great uncle had two daughters and was divorced from their mother when they were very young. I had a picture of the girls together at age 2 and 3. It might be a picture their families have never seen. It is now attached to their graves.

I have been loading family pictures (attached to graves) too.

Photo (printing pictures/albums) update

So freaking many pictures

First, as I mentioned a week or two ago, I move posts backwards quite frequently. This week I moved a lot back, so if you only get on occasionally, you will want to glance a week or more backward each time to catch all posts.

Second, I worked on pictures for about six hours today. First I looked to see what digital pictures were on the computer that had not been put in our youngest's album. My husband had the albums. I had the computer. It went faster with two of us. There were a lot. I ordered all those. I ordered on line from my local store. 4x6 matte.

When I was in the photo files, looking to order for youngest, I put a new file in each file labeled "pictures". So the photos stayed in their original file, but were easily found. So there might be 50 pictures in the "2010 Chicago" file, but I only wanted 8 printed. I put those 8 in a "pictures" file within the "2010 Chicago" file so I could find them easily.  I had a window open for the photo lab. As I filled each "picture" file, I immediately uploaded those pictures to the lab website. When I had all the photos uploaded, then I went in the site and did my cropping. 

I am not sure I mentioned, youngest is not a dedicated picture taker. So, I contacted her friends (weeks ago) and asked them to email pictures (with her in them) to me. I got several dozen. Most I had never seen. Some were from grade school.

Then I worked on the picture computer files from the years when we were using digital cameras. The way we were downloading at that time produced files on the computer with more than one topic/occassion in them. I found a lot of duplicate pictures. I found the same pictures with different digital dates on them (I guess because of when they were downloaded). I did not delete any pictures. Instead I filed all of them. We figured better to have the same pictures under 2007 Zoo and 2008 Zoo than to accidentally delete all copies. I opened two windows. I looked at pictures in one window and clicked and dragged to new files I made in the other window. I start most files with a year. (Middle has so many college files that I have a whole big grouping that start with her name.)

There were pictures on our computer that I had not seen. There were pictures my husband had not seen. Because pictures have been coming off of multiple digital cameras and iPods for years.

So, you guessed it, I ended up with a second on line order from pictures I found tidying files.

I am not done tidying files.

All this showed me that our current method of everyone putting all digital pictures in drop box and then me moving them from drop box to specific picture files is extremely effective. Yes, at this point we have lot of picture files. But I am consistent with my file labels, so we can easily find things.

Interestingly, I eat very little when I am involved with any type of project. The time just flies. Two days in a row now I thought it was about 5pm and it as actually 9:30pm. Friday it was because I was watching a marathon of Shark Tank and cross stitching Angels. Saturday it as because I was knee deep in picture files on the computer. Both days just flew.

And I have figured out how to be very fast on the Angels. I do the same thing on multiples. So I do the stars on several. Or I do the doves on several. Same placement, same thread. The only danger is I have to be very careful of what I am doing. If I do the wrong thing, I am doing it on several pieces, not just one. So far that has not happened.

Meanwhile my husband has envelopes of old family pictures ready to go to his brothers. He had me go through them to see if I wanted copies of any of them for the kids. (He has the originals or has scanned every picture.) The ones I thought I wanted, he put in groups on the table and then took a picture (of the group of photos) so he can have prints of those made for the kids' albums. It was a way to touch it once and be able to send to his brothers.

So we have contemporary pictures going and very old pictures going. We keep them in two different spots in the house.

Oh, my, goodness.

pictures

These are in the same order as the previous picture (earlier in the week) when I was changing out the purple dress on the left for darker periwinkle to avoid duplicate colors. I also changed the star color for the green dress angel slightly. I like her with the lighter yellow. Keeping previous yellow (which is more gold) for purple dress angel.

I am not sure I ever posted a picture of the picture shelves (living room) after we finished them. These black frames with no matting or white/off white matting really unify.  Very pleased. Previously there were dozens of small frames on these shelves. Too many. No unification.

I saw a pinterest with a huge wall of photos (picture rails very much like these, but whole length of wall) where they had used both white and black frames. For a sea of photos, that was a good idea.