My daughter and I enjoyed shopping together in antique stores when she was younger. Once she saw some vintage family photos in a booth and said she thought it was sad the photos weren’t with the family they belonged to. She wanted to find the families and return their photos to them. Lofty goal for a young girl. Vintage family photos, slides and negatives are valuable but only to the family they belong to. Where are your old family photos?
In May, I found hundreds of priceless old family photos and negatives from the early 1900’s in my Mom’s shed. Some of the envelopes have tiny teeth marks left by the shed’s inhabitants. With Mom’s blessing, I took them home and couldn’t wait to see what images would appear.
I scanned the photos while watching my Denver Broncos play mediocre football at best last past season. Then I enhanced the photos and shared them on our cousin Facebook page so everyone could enjoy them. While we don’t know who everyone is in the photos it has certainly brought us together. These old family photos gave us something to talk about. The images made our grandparents and their siblings we had lost years ago come alive again in ways many of us had never seen before.
Once I finished scanning the photos I began researching a negative scanner to reproduce their images. I got lucky. Our public library had one. I would not have to buy one but I would have to spend many hours scanning the old negatives one by one and then enhance them. To make saving and sharing the images easier, I created an album in Google photos. That way everyone could view them, comment on them, and make or save copies of them.
I just finished the process of scanning over 300 negatives with rare images of my maternal grandmother and her siblings as children. The batch of negatives also included images of my mother and her nine siblings from birth during the depression years throughout their high school graduations.
The photo editing software at the public library helped bring the photo negatives to life. My Mom’s family grew up on a farm in rural Jones County, Iowa. Some of the vintage images depict a hard life but also many family gatherings. The family farmhouse is gone but the memories are living on through these priceless vintage family photos. Thanks to those who captured the images on film and saved them for the family to treasure 100 years later.
One of my favorite finds…a photo of my maternal grandfather, John Henry:
At least I know the old family photos and negatives I found will not end up in the trash or in an antique store booth somewhere like these. Instead they were shared with my cousins and their families on a group Facebook page. Where are your old family photos?