Old pictures

[Cheesecake]

We were at my ILs yesterday and took a bunch of MIL's pictures and negatives home to scan (so she can duplicate them or put them in an album, or whatever).
There are pictures and negatives from 1936 in there. So friggin cool. Pictures from DH's grandparents on their honeymoon among other things.

Funny picture story: GMIL wrote shorthand (and MIL can read it) and she wrote on the envelopes she stored the pictures in. MIL read it and got all confused: 'When did they travel to Nepal, I didn't know that - they never told me anything.' Turns out in shorthand, Nepal and Napoli are the same... (and yes, we had her write out all the info in regular letters.)

[tktravels]

I absolutely love looking through old photos, letters, and such. And scanning them is such a good idea!

Are you into genealogy as well?

I look forward to being less transient in the future so I can once again visit boxes of relics that are being kept by older relatives and help to bring the photos and such into the digital age.

[crimsonandclover]

I inherited what my Grandma always referred to as "the German letters," which were some letters sent by her side's German relatives after her dad/grandfather immigrated to the States. They're pretty cool :-) I love old family stuff like that.

[Cheesecake]

I loooove figuring out/looking at genealogy, not too much into deep research, but when I find stuff online, I love it.

Fortunately DH's family (MIL's side) has saved absolutely everything. We received DH's birth certificate from the day his dad reported him as being born yesterday as well. (In NL a birth certificate is valid for 3 or 6 months only, but you can just go to city hall and pick a new one up at any time - it's a different system. So most people toss certificates as soon as they're no longer valid. Having the one from when DH was reported, is fairly rare.)

I'm kinda jealous of it, as my parents just toss everything. I was lucky to rescue my school report cards and stuff when they were about to be tossed as I got into college (and obviously didn't need them anymore). My mom just hates clutter and tosses like crazy, and my dad just doesn't care for sentimental stuff (I made him and stepmom a (actually really nice, handmade) piece of artwork, in a super-pretty frame for their wedding. It was all kinds of dried flowers and stuff, professionally framed, etcetera. I'm pretty sure they still have the frame and put some poster they bought somewhere and liked in there and tossed the wedding gift I made them.)

So whenever I find old pictured, drawings, letters and whatnot I get overly giddy! :-)
(and when we have children, I'll make sure to save their crap so that by the time I die, they can decide on their own whether it's important or not)

[clogged]

Jul 29, 2012 16:28:03 GMT -5 Cheesecake said:

Fortunately DH's family (MIL's side) has saved absolutely everything. We received DH's birth certificate from the day his dad reported him as being born yesterday as well. (In NL a birth certificate is valid for 3 or 6 months only, but you can just go to city hall and pick a new one up at any time - it's a different system. So most people toss certificates as soon as they're no longer valid. Having the one from when DH was reported, is fairly rare.)

I kept the girls' ones too. There is something about it being "the first" that is cool to me.

[anna7602]

My grandmother's youngest sibling in Cuba kept a huge box of all the family photos when the rest of the family emigrated or passed away (he lived with my grandmother in Havana until her death). It was so amazing to find this the first time I went there in 1999. I started taking a few photos back home with me on each trip, but one of my dad's cousins in Havana still has the huge box in his possession now. I love the idea of the box staying there in Cuba and hope that one day I'll be going back and adding to it (pictures of my own wedding, of DD, etc.) instead of just taking away.

[pittpurple]

We ended up with a lot of stuff when DH's grandmother passed away. She was a saver - every single letter she wrote she photocopied and saved! Obviously we had to get rid of a ton of stuff, but we found some amazing photos and the letters she wrote right after DH (1st grandchild) was born which was super sweet.

[GilliC]

My parents are hugely into genealogy, and they have all the originals of photos and things. Whenever one of my cousins would get married, they'd color-photocopy all the relevant family records and photos as part of their wedding gift.

I think I'm supposed to get the originals, and I have huge guilt issues, because I move way too much to be the keeper of that stuff. Aside from the risk of it being lost/damaged in a shipping container, I just don't have a place to keep it a lot of the time. It goes beyond the documents, because my mother is a saver and has all kinds of family heirlooms (dolls, tablecloths, knick-knacks, etc) and I will never be able to take all that stuff!

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

[oneslybookworm]

That is so cool! I wish my parents had stuff like that to give to me, it would be amazing to read about their lives.

[GilliC]

It is cool to know so much back story about the family.

It is less cool to spend hours of your weekends as a pre-teen sitting in dark library microfilm rooms while your parents squint at old census records trying to find some great-great-great-great-grandparent who may have moved to that county in the early 1700s.

It is even less cool when a friend tags you in a pub-crawl post on Facebook, and one of your not-so-FB-savvy relatives comments on the photo that you should be careful because you have a long family history of depression and substance abuse.