I love taking photos and have since I was a kid. I also love looking at the really old pictures passed down through the family. It’s really sad when there are some pictures and no one seems to know the names and relationships. It makes me wonder. How many years will it take before no one remembers me?
I remember sitting on my granny’s bed in Oklahoma and looking through her stash of pictures. I would ask, “Who is this, granny?” She always had all the answers. I wish I would have written down what she told me. Now a lot of her photos are at my parent’s house. All the relatives, including my own kids love to go through all those photos. Most of them are loose in heart-shaped candy boxes. They have been gone through so many times the corners are bent but that doesn’t matter much. They’ve been well loved.
Being on Facebook has been a gold mine for finding photos that I had never seen before. Once a distant cousin sent me some her mama had saved. It was a picture of my great-grandparents and one of my daddy when he was a baby. I’ve posted them all up on a Facebook family page for all my other relatives to enjoy. Through those photos I’ve met relatives I never knew existed. Now I have faces to go with photos of people I may never meet in person but I’ve gotten to know online and that feels wonderful.
Sharing Pictures
Photos are meant to be shared.
I’ve made quite a few photo albums for my parents, my children and now for my grandkids. I try to put all the really old ones in. They have made great Christmas gifts. The grandkids get a kick out of seeing they parents when they were young. They laugh a lot at those pictures.
I also have made collages of my favorite photos and given them to my parents. They look at them all the time. I made an album for them on their 60th wedding anniversary and they are still looking at it regularly and that was three years ago. There are pictures of them feeding each other their wedding cake and one of them when they had just started going out. Oh, the stories they tell as they look through those pictures. They are transported back to a time when they were so young and might I say, very good looking.
The photo of my great-grandparents sits on my office desk. My granddaddy is in the picture and it was taken when he was probably around eight or nine. I see my own kids’ faces in his. I see my daddy’s face too. That photo is the only one anyone in the family has of my great-grandmother. She died when my granddaddy was about 11. He had to help raise his three younger sisters. Two of them are in the same photo. The youngest had not been born yet.
I’m not worried about my kids or even my grandkids remembering me even long after I am gone. I hope their memories are really good ones about how much I loved them. While I don’t have any great-grandkids yet, I do wonder if they will know me long enough to remember me. I wonder if they want to keep a few photos of me and tell their own children about the old lady in the picture. The older I get, the more I want to know about my own long-gone relatives. I hope that future generations will want to know too. So, I’ll keep talking about all those relatives even my children didn’t know. I’ll keep calling one of my granddaughters by my granny’s name so then perhaps she’ll want to know more about her. I’ll keep calling my first grandson by my daddy’s nickname “Punk” so he will remember.
