I went through all of Mom's albums and scrapbooks last night, intending to throw them away after looking at them one more time. However, one of the albums held photos and other memorabilia from my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. I asked myself if this was something that would have interested me if it had been my grandparents' or great-grandparents' anniversary. The answer was "yes." So I've decided to do something with this material for my descendents. I'd liked how a cousin had made a small album for each of us with photos and clippings of the legendary trip our dads, as young men, took to Chicago. Creating a small album around a specific event seems like the way to go with these anniversary materials.
This brings me to the subject of all the other photos I had accumulated over the years. Not only did I have boxes and boxes of slides, I also had a huge box of old family photos that had been passed down to me. A year ago I decided it was time to "take a bite" out of all this stuff.
The first thing I did was to contact my ex-husband to see if he was interested in any of our mutual-family slides. He was, and offered to scan the slides and convert them to a digital format. When he was finished, he made CD's of the images our son and both of us. I was then able to discard the slides and all of the slide equipment. Yea!
Later I found a few more slides and took them to Wal-Mart to have digitized. The result were so poor, I threw out the CD. Fred Meyer was slightly more expensive, but the results were much better. Frankly, I don't know how long the CD images will last, but I will not go to my grave with tons of slides as my parents did!
Scanning was a partial solution to the old photos as well. (It depends on your equipment and the resolution one wants of course.) I scanned the photos I thought my brother and cousins might like and emailed them in attachments. They were thrilled to have pictures they'd never seem before. As with most family photo achieves, there were many unidentified people. I scanned those too and sent them to our family historian. I also gave her one entire photo album that had belonged to a mutual relative.
I boldly threw out photos that I was sure would never have any meaning to anyone again. I now have one medium-sized box of old photos. Someday they will have to be dealt with, but I feel as if I've made significant progress in this area.
One cool result of all of this work was that I discovered some very fun photos of my mom as a child at the beach with her family. There is no doubt of the era (1920's) because of the style of swimsuits. I printed up and framed five of these images and hung them in our guest bathroom. I expect we'll have these in our next guest bath too, assuming we'll have a next guest bath. But I'm not ready to think much about that just yet.
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