Preserving Photographic Memories

I have spent the last couple of months labeling all of my family photographs. Fortunately, I had them partly organized. Even so, I puzzled over some of them. The picture was familiar, but I couldn't quite place what event or trip or time they were from. This brought home to me how important it is to immediately label current photographs. Life can get busy, changes happen with lightening speed, and the clarity of past events quickly blur.

George Morgan has written and excellent article, Identifying Family Photographs to get you motivated to start labeling your own photographs and hints to help figure out when they were taken.

As you label them is the perfect time to organize. I keep my photographs in a long, narrow photograph storage box. You can get these at photography shops and large office supply stores. I cut large index cards into tabbed dividers. This saved me a lot of money because divider packages were much more expensive, and dividers cut specifically for the boxes were even more expensive. The money I save here, will go for reproducing and restoring later. This is only a temporary storage unit for them. A further step will be a more permanent home for preservation. But, that is a bit further down the road on this project. The boxes now serve as a way for me to initially organize them.

I then started with the oldest pictures of my personal history (the ancestors pictures I plan to deal with later). My collection of childhood pictures was sparse so I divided them by decades (that helped when I was unable to pinpoint a year ). Working upwards, I found I spot where the photographs increased, and I was able to label them with a specific year (most of the time). Sorting and separating them, I began to remember family events, birthdays, holidays, and vacations. There were periods of my life that I moved a lot, so I made a personal time line of houses. It helped when I saw a picture that included the house, outside or inside, and tried to remember if it was in 1978 or 1979 that we moved.

There are many clues that you can find by closely examining your pictures. Somehow, a pile of Christmas pictures, covering various years got mixed together. One Christmas looked like the next. I sorted them out like a detective. Looking for the placement of the furniture, the decorations, etc. and matching them with pictures with the kids and pinning down their ages. I must admit it was tedious; but it brought back a lot of memories that I will include in my family history, illustrated by these photographs. I have also been a journal keeper. Referring to these journals have helped my place the dates of trips and events.

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