A box of old photos - So Many Memories

A few years ago, after my mother passed away, I volunteered to take the boxes and boxes of family photos that were left in my parents house.  There are over 80 years worth of photos, thousands of individual images, some of these precious photos go all the way back to the 1930’s. 

I decided that I really want to scan these photos, to save and preserve them for future generations.  I did some research and picked out a scanner.  I have only just begun to get through the pictures, but it has been a very moving experience to go through these boxes.  Hidden in these albums so far were; a picture of my Great Grandma holding my infant Grandmother in her arms, photos of my great uncle in his Navy uniform right before he was shipped out for World War II, pictures of my mother as a teenager in the 1940’s and1950’s, and a picture of all my siblings from 50 years ago, at what is obviously my first Christmas.  Its overwhelming, the incredible amount of memories stored in these boxes.  It is as if history has come alive right before my eyes. 

I still don’t know exactly how to work the scanner and do all the cool photo editing options, and I don’t have a fantastic plan for storing all these photos yet, but I am having so much fun going through the pictures.  Most of the photos are in those awful sticky back photo albums, so I have to be extremely carefully removing the photos.  On the bright side, my mom was really great about actually labeling quite a few of the photos, so for many of the pictures I know who is in the photo and when it was taken.  This has been tremendously helpful. 

I found a few photos of a famous Navy Vice Admiral from World War II and I wish I knew more about that story.  How did my Grandma know him?  Why were there photos of him?   I wish I knew more about all of the stories.  I only wish I had paid more attention to the stories that my mom and grandma told us.  They are no longer around to help fill in the details. 

My hope is to organize and scan all of the photos and have them available for my siblings to view/download also if they wanted to. These photos represent my history, and it is incredible to see these smiling faces staring up at me from the past.  I want to be able to share their stories with my daughters and I want to preserve their stories for many generations to come.