![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oh, Photos... I Caint Quit Yew...
Jul. 15th, 2008 10:41 pmI am deeply troubled by the concept of discarding photographs. Luke has a box of family photos. I went through with him it recently to consolidate things.
Luke used to live in the house that his aunt Mary owned. She left it to him when she died, and he lived there for several years. He ended up with a lot of her photos. Mary was Luke's father's sister. She and her husband Charlie had no kids. We decided to toss her pictures of people that we didn't know, of trips and events that have no meaning for us. No-one else in Luke's family is interested in her pictures. It's heartbreaking for me to just discard someone's life like that. But we did keep plenty of pictures *of* aunt Mary and uncle Charlie, just not of the stuff they did.
There is a separate little box, and it contains photos of Charlie's family. This is the box that's killing me. There are black-and-white photos from the teens, 20's, 30's, 40's, much like the collection of my own family, but none of them have any information. No names, nothing. These are forgotten people, a lost and forgotten family, and it makes me so sad. These are Charlie's parents, grandparents, their siblings, and they're doing all the things a normal family takes pictures of: weddings, new babies, fishing trips, kids playing in the yard, formal religious events. A normal, happy looking family. Now forgotten. Because of what my own family photos mean to me, I just cannot bring myself to throw the pictures of these strangers away. Could long-deceased uncle Charlie have living relatives somewhere who might be interested in these pictures? I guess I can't get rid of them until I at least try to find out. All I have to go on is Charlie's name.
Another reason to go through Luke's pictures was to find a certain picture of him as a kid that I'd like to scan. I know we have the picture, I remember seeing it when we first went through the box back on Interlake Ave. This was long before we moved to Fremont. But that one photo seems to have disappeared. Hmm..
Luke used to live in the house that his aunt Mary owned. She left it to him when she died, and he lived there for several years. He ended up with a lot of her photos. Mary was Luke's father's sister. She and her husband Charlie had no kids. We decided to toss her pictures of people that we didn't know, of trips and events that have no meaning for us. No-one else in Luke's family is interested in her pictures. It's heartbreaking for me to just discard someone's life like that. But we did keep plenty of pictures *of* aunt Mary and uncle Charlie, just not of the stuff they did.
There is a separate little box, and it contains photos of Charlie's family. This is the box that's killing me. There are black-and-white photos from the teens, 20's, 30's, 40's, much like the collection of my own family, but none of them have any information. No names, nothing. These are forgotten people, a lost and forgotten family, and it makes me so sad. These are Charlie's parents, grandparents, their siblings, and they're doing all the things a normal family takes pictures of: weddings, new babies, fishing trips, kids playing in the yard, formal religious events. A normal, happy looking family. Now forgotten. Because of what my own family photos mean to me, I just cannot bring myself to throw the pictures of these strangers away. Could long-deceased uncle Charlie have living relatives somewhere who might be interested in these pictures? I guess I can't get rid of them until I at least try to find out. All I have to go on is Charlie's name.
Another reason to go through Luke's pictures was to find a certain picture of him as a kid that I'd like to scan. I know we have the picture, I remember seeing it when we first went through the box back on Interlake Ave. This was long before we moved to Fremont. But that one photo seems to have disappeared. Hmm..
