My daughter, Megan, is the genealogist of the family. Like my brother before her, she has amassed an enviable amount of information about her/our ancestors--fascinating stuff. She's had a little bit of professional experience with this business and is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to documenting relationships and organizing the information to make it easier to access when desired. She is also a whiz at Internet searches, which comes in handy for genealogy work. On her father's side of her ancestry, she can go back six or seven generations, so far. (His folks moved to Putnam County, IN, and stayed there.) On my side, the generations don't go back quite so far, for reasons that may become clear later on in this post. We both get wrapped up in the drama of the lives of the people we seek to find. Hours upon hours can be spent on this, without noticing!
A year or so ago, we borrowed the photo albums that are in my sister's custody in order to scan all of the old family pictures, to save them. Old photographs are quite fragile. Moisture, light, tape, mishandling, acid from hands, etc., can all destroy them over time. Thus, saving them on the computer prevents them from being lost should disaster happen. Meg faithfully scanned most of them, with only a little bit of help from me. There are more to be done, of course, but much has been preserved.
Understand that the albums we borrowed from my sister weren't professionally done. We--a combination of my sister, Megan, me, and our aunt--took the pictures out of a big box after my folks' deaths and plopped them into albums without any attempt to identify who was in the photos. And one album consisted of a branch of the family that no one knew much about. (Not sure how we came to possess that one.) So now, the task remains to figure out the subjects of the pictures, and where/when they were taken.
Late last Sunday, as I sat in a blue funk, having gotten myself into trouble on Facebook again, (which I've already written about), Meg told me I could help her a great deal if I would go through the scanned pictures in order to ID them. All I had to do was tell her when I was ready and willing to do that. I had nothing to lose. Maybe doing this would steady my frayed, snowed-in nerves. So, Meg gave me access to the site that held the pics, with the authority to edit. I began. Easy, right?
WRONG! I never really knew my father's family. His parents both died before I was born. He was the youngest of ten children who were all pretty much scattered. He also avoided much association with them because he had his own family and life to tend to, but here are the pictures of them, and I'm supposed to be able to name them! Also, three of his six brothers--one of which wasn't really a brother--were known by knicknames: Boy-boy, Honey, Swede. Ack! Which one is which?? I only met two of his brothers, although I knew all three of his sisters...sort of.
I was quite close to my mother's family, however.....but....many of the pictures are of times and events that took place before I was even born. Some include friends of my grandparents who were only a whisper in my life after I WAS born. Some are distant relatives whose connection to the family is unknown to me but is somewhere in the back of my brain. Identifying people, places, and events was a bit of a labor of love, but it also became an exercise in driving myself nuts trying to come up with names to place on semi-familiar faces. One picture was particularly vexing because I knew the names of virtually everyone except one child, a child that I had known. A child whose name should not have eluded me! (After two days and an email to my sister, the name appeared...but it was only a pop-up in her mind, too!) The appearance of the family farm had changed substantially from the time of the pictures to the time that I knew it. The dates could only be estimated by the apparent age of the folks in the pictures. In short, the supposedly simple task of labeling pictures has become a major exercise of dredging things from the corners of my memory. Sometimes, it was stressful! It's there, somewhere. Why can't I remember? (Why I can't remember has to do with the fact that all of those people are gone, and I am 66 years old!)
Meg's research has provided a lot of dead ends. Some of the most frustrating are:
*An ancestor who died at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. Can't find a grave for him because no one seems to know what they did with their dead.
*My grandmother's paternal ancestry because she was born out of wedlock (and hid that all her life), so we have no clue where to start to locate blood relatives on that side of the family.
And so it goes. On one bright note, Meg discovered that she is distantly related to Daniel Boone because his daughter or sister or someone married a Bryan, which carries on through her paternal grandmother's side of the family. She is also related to Pearl Bryan, the unfortunate woman of local legend who was murdered/decapitated because she was pregnant out of wedlock. (You can search for her on the Internet. There is much there.)
I couldn't make this stuff up! We are a collection of all of our ancestor's experiences. I find it absolutely fascinating, when my brain isn't weary from trying to remember old names and old faces! I'm not done with the picture project yet, but it has helped to keep me out of trouble elsewhere.
If I can glean anything from all of this to pass on to you, find that big box of pictures in your family (you know there is one!) and begin to label who's who and what's what. Do it NOW. If you wait and you pass before it is done, is there anyone after you who can do it? Don't let these precious family mementos get away unnoticed! And good luck draining your memory banks!
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