I don't know how most families are in terms of archiving their histories, especially with photographs. Looking at the last twenty years my family hasn't done all that well, thanks to the typical-but-quickly-fading fad of getting prints at the 1-hour-foto booth.
I don't know about you, but I hate the eventual box 'o prints that get out of order, take too much effort to flip through, and are impossible to organize. Well, from the period of 1957-1980 (or so) my parents chose the "right" (in my view) medium: the slide. We have about 18 carousels of slides that go from my parent's first Christmas to the first child—it's hard to say if that is my brother, Mark, or their boxer "Brig"—to all the family trips to visit relatives and all the houses they lived in, to about the time when my folks got divorced.
And don't get me wrong: the end of that excellent archive had more to do with the switch to print film than with my parents splitting up.
Anyway, I made a deal with Mom that if she buy a new high-quality "slide and negative" scanner, I would go through the agony of scanning in all 1500+ slides, and I would take a crack at what negatives I could find from the prints.
So while I do my regular computer work, every five minutes the tray gets spit out of this funny machine. I unload it, reload it with four new slides, dust them off with a camel-hair brush, load them, and set it to scanning again.
It's been fascinating going through the family history, month by month, watching my older brothers get born (Okay, not really. No gruesome delivery-room pics thankfully.) and grow up. I'm just amazed seeing my parents in these pictures, younger than I am today. Also interesting is seeing my home town as it looked when it was still a fairly small town, free of the cancerous growths that plague it currently. The other thing that's cute is how much Mike and Mark (by brothers) look like my nephews (Max and Riley).
Right now I'm where the two pairs are basically the same age. And dare I say it: my brothers were really cute. (Don't worry: that was momentary.)
I've now scanned 900 images. There's much more to do, but it's getting done at a regular pace. What a little exciting is that in about three months (or maybe 2 more hours of scanning) I will be born.
Posted by Murray Todd Williams at October 5, 2004 04:18 AM