Old family photos

I mentioned earlier that one thing my mom and I did over my most recent visit was to go through some old photographs she had, and pick out a bunch to take to a photo reprinting/restoring place (JMC Photos in Bloomington, IL, and I can highly recommend them, even going back to the days when they processed Kodakchrome slides I took while doing fieldwork). Some of the photos she wanted copies of to send to a distant cousin who had done some research on the Ames/Burt side of the family, some were for me, some were for my brother, some were for nieces and nephews of hers.

The photos came on Monday.

Most of the photos existed as photos, which are easy enough to copy (but I've seen some bad copies of old photos made). A couple, she had negatives for - the big, black-and-white negatives. I'm not sure what film format they were, it was obviously not 35 mm, the negatives were (IIRC) something like 2" by 3".

And there was one photo that had been cut up - it was a picture of my great grandmother with my grandmother as a baby and two of her siblings. Apparently at some point my grandmother needed a photo of herself as a baby (Probably for one of those "Guess who this baby grew up to be" ice-breaker things somewhere) and so she cut the photo. We had all the pieces, but a photo in pieces is fairly useless. My mom kept wondering if JMC could put it back together (Even after I told her, "If you had a scanner and Adobe Photoshop, *I* could put them back together. It wouldn't be a very good job, but you could print out a photo that was in one piece.")

At the photo place they said, "Sure, this will be easy - none of the faces have cuts across them, and the creasing on the photo is minor."

And true to their word (and to the Clone Pixel tool), they did it - I can't even tell where the cuts were on the corrected photo.

I'm super-happy to have the photos. There's a very nice one of my great-grandparents, later in life, standing out in front of the farmhouse where they lived most of their married lives. When I get that one framed, I'm going to hang it up next to the wedding portrait I have of them - this one was taken some 55 years later.

And there's a nice one of my grandma and my two aunts. As I said, I'm sure it was taken well before I was born (Aunt Chickie, in particular, is slimmer than I ever remember her being) - but they look (in the faces) like I remember them, and that makes me happy. (I'm going to frame that one and put it up on the wall, too).

People have different ways of remembering loved ones. I know some people who keep the "ashes" (cremains) of family members in their houses. And there's a company that will make an artificial gemstone using cremains. And the Victorians had their hair jewelry - brooches and pendants containing small braids of hair, often from someone who had died.

I have to admit that I wouldn't find any of those things particularly comforting. What I want, to remember someone I loved who is now gone, is a good photo of them - preferably from a time in their lives when they were well and happy, and were maybe doing something they loved. One of the reasons I like the photo of my grandma and my two aunts so much is that they're sitting out on my grandma's porch, obviously talking (visiting was a big pastime up in the town where my grandma lived), and they're smiling at the camera. And as I said, they all look "like themselves" - not like they started to look after they started to get sick. (My grandmother suffered terribly from osteoporosis, one of my aunts had been a long-time smoker and got cancer...)

And there's one of my grandfather as a young man. My mother says she can't judge how old he was in the photo (I'd say 20...he was born in 1880, married in 1917, and the photo was taken some years before he married. Men's clothing doesn't hold as many "clues" to the year as women's clothing does, so it's hard to tell - he's in a dark suit with one of those stiff collar things and a narrow tie.) It's a nice old photo, though, sepia-toned. And when I look at I can definitely tell that this man was my mother's father...I can even see a bit of his features in my brother's face.

There were a couple of surprise pictures - I guess I hadn't noticed her taking in the negatives (these were ones she only had negatives for). There's one of her in cap and gown for high school graduation, and another one of her as a teenager goofing around in her parents' back yard (trying to ride a tricycle that is too short for her). It's funny, my mom looks much the same (at least in the face) as a teenager as she does now. (Perhaps that's part of my distress about being treated by some people as being younger than I actually am/feel: maybe I really DO look younger than my actual age and all women in my family just DO. I suppose I should really be happy about that...)

Also, it puts to rest a claim someone made on Ravelry, that "no woman in the 1950s would be caught dead wearing jeans." My mom is probably 16 or 17 in that photo, and she's wearing jeans. With the cuffs rolled up, "sloppy Joe" style. And a plaid blouse. And, I think, saddle shoes, but I might be misremembering that detail. (I know my mom said she wasn't allowed to wear jeans to school because of a dress code, but from what she's said, it sounds like she wore them a lot at home.)